Mhe aim of this project is to present a concrete and authenticated historical event.
Analysis of the relationship between Catholics and National Socialism.
A Palatine pastor - resister and victim (?)
On the night of 23 June 1933, a terrible act of violence took place in Königsbach in the Palatinate, near the Gau capital Neustadt an der Haardt. A group of around ten SS men from Neustadt had travelled to Königsbach in a coal lorry. On the way, another twelve SS men in civilian clothes had boarded the lorry in Mußbach. The SS men first stopped off at the station restaurant of the NSDAP cell leader Adolf Frey, where, according to a later witness statement, they were served "buckets" of wine to give them courage for the subsequent planned action. The men wanted to arrest the Catholic priest of Königsbach, Jakob Martin, whereby the SS men in civilian clothes were given the role of "making a fuss about it" so that it would look as if the priest had been taken into protective custody from an angry mob. Once everyone was sufficiently drunk, they moved to the vicarage, where the streets all around had already been cordoned off by SA men so that not too many people would have the opportunity to witness the proceedings.
What happened next was nothing less than an extremely brutal attack on the priest, who only survived this serious offence with some luck. First the SS men smashed the windows, broke down the front door and dragged the priest, who had fled to the upper floor, out into the street in his slippers. There he was threatened with a loaded revolver and then driven through the streets with wild insults and constant beatings. Individual Königsbach Catholics tried to help, but were themselves beaten and driven off by the SA men. It is unclear what the many other Königsbach Catholics did. When Martin got to the coal lorry, he was covered in blood. According to later witnesses, he was then thrown onto the lorry bed "like a piece of cattle", accompanied by shouts such as "You're not going to die soon, you black dog!"
and "Break it!".
The drunken SS men then drove Martin to Neustadt, where he was beaten further with rubber truncheons and interrogated in the Gauleitung building. He was then locked up in the district court prison and only released three days later on condition that he hide in the vicarage until his wounds had healed to some extent.
The SS men gave free rein to their sadistic instincts because they had been harassed for years and regarded Pastor Martin as an opponent of "their national community" due to his sermons against National Socialism and his political activities for the Bavarian People's Party. To ensure a sufficiently brutal approach, well-known SS thugs were chosen, but it is possible that Catholics were also among the SS and SA men who went into action here, as Martin Hanisch's research has shown that the 96-man Neustadt SS-Sturm 9/10 had just over seven per cent Catholics in its ranks, a third were Protestant and the rest were non-denominational. Some Catholics among the SS men severed their ties to the Church over time under the pressure of the code of conduct in the SS, but SS man Walter Lanz, for example, did not. He had himself married as a Catholic as late as 1936 and had his children baptised as Catholics in the following years.
Where did the Catholics stand? This question arises in view of the events in Königsbach in the Palatinate, which incidentally became so well known that it was raised with some vigour during the concordat negotiations in Rome in 1933. At the same time, this example can be used to trace the entire development of the discussion about the position of Catholics and their "resistance" in the "Third Reich".
Catholics and resistance - first categorisations of the post-war period
At first glance, Pastor Martin was probably a "persecuted person", a "victim" of the SS raid described above and also an early "resistance fighter" due to his anti-Nazi speeches at the right time. In the immediate post-war period and in the 1950s, the majority of people would have agreed with this. At that time, the general perception of resistance was characterised by experiences that were similar to what happened in Königsbach, and also by two early and soon quite prominent writings on the subject of the Church and National Socialism, which had a great impact: On the one hand, the Jesuit Anton Koch propagated as early as 1947 in an essay On the Resistance of the Church: "The Church and National Socialism were in all essentials as mutually exclusive as light and darkness, as truth and lies, as life and death."
On the other hand, the Munich Auxiliary Bishop Johannes Neuhäusler, himself a victim of the repressive apparatus and imprisoned in a concentration camp for years, documented Catholic resistance in his book Kreuz und Hakenkreuz (2nd edition 1946) and presented it as a quasi general phenomenon of Catholicism, which could be summarised in a kind of formula "being Catholic = being a Nazi opponent and resister".
Of course, it should not be overlooked that such sweeping categorisations have been criticised from the very beginning. Probably the clearest was formulated as early as 1946 by the Catholic and first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Konrad Adenauer, in a letter to the Bonn pastor Dr Bernhard Custodis. It said: "In my opinion, the German people and also the bishops and the clergy bear a great deal of guilt for the events in the concentration camps. It is true that perhaps not much more could be done afterwards. The blame lies earlier. The German people, including the bishops and clergy for the most part, responded to the National Socialist agitation. They allowed themselves to be brought into line almost without resistance, indeed in part with enthusiasm [...]. Therein lies its guilt." And Adenauer continued: "I believe that if the bishops had all taken a public stand against it from the pulpits on a certain day, they could have prevented many things. That did not happen and there is no excuse for it. If the bishops had been imprisoned or sent to a concentration camp as a result, that would not be a disgrace, on the contrary. None of that happened and that's why it's best to keep quiet."
"That is why it is best to remain silent" - this concluding sentence is decoupling: because the generation of those who had experienced it remained silent or, as we now know from the diaries of Munich Cardinal Faulhaber, defiantly and self-righteously refused to admit their own failures, it was all too easy for a rather skewed idea of the Catholic Church and National Socialism to spread. This tended to lay undifferentiated claim to the morally charged concept of resistance, which provoked increasingly fierce opposition.
However, the Reich Concordat trial held before the Federal Constitutional Court from 1955 to 1957 did, despite all the silence, make the question of the Catholic Church's behaviour very public and led to the first veritable controversy about it. The expert reports submitted at the trial drew attention to the all-too-quick declaration by the German bishops on 28 March 1933, which withdrew some of the reservations about National Socialism that had applied until then, and to the Reich Concordat of 20 July 1933 itself, whose role in the consolidation of the Nazi state was now illuminated.
An essay by Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde in 1961, published in the Catholic journal Hochland, sparked even more controversy because Böckenförde claimed that the Catholic Church had an affinity with authoritarian regimes, emphasised the Church's anti-liberalism and recognised anti-Bolshevism as an important commonality in the thinking of both National Socialists and Catholics. It was primarily on this basis that he explained a certain rapprochement between the Catholic Church and National Socialism.
The debate continued in many thematic areas, most prominently with regard to the Centre Party's abandonment of political Catholicism. Even this superficial look at early controversies surrounding the Church and the Nazi state shows: Contrary to what some relevant publications would have you believe, the question of where Catholics actually stood, in the resistance or closer to the regime, is by no means new and has always characterised the debate over the past 60 years or so. Of course, there has always been a faction that has sought to explain the Church's behaviour and another that has sought to criticise it, primarily against the background of historical experience. But even a historian like Konrad Repgen, who today is often categorised as an apologist for the church's position, emphasised as early as the 1970s that the church had "no reason to be proud after everything that happened from 1933 to 1945".
Controversial stance of the Catholic Church
This is all the more true as more and more areas of church behaviour have subsequently come under criticism: One need only think of the position taken by the Catholic Church towards the persecution of Jewish fellow citizens, fuelled by Rolf Hochhuth's 1963 drama The Vicar, which made the much-quoted phrase "the Pope's silence" as popular as it was controversial. The question of the relationship between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism has also fuelled this discussion, right up to the occasionally expressed assumption that a modern anti-Semitism that is also spreading more and more in the Catholic Church has promoted the previously unimaginable crimes against humanity committed against the Jews and played into the hands of the racist anti-Semitism of the National Socialists. There were intensive discussions on these and many other topics relating to the Church's actions during the Nazi era, which cast doubt on the Church's general resistance, as was often assumed in the first years after the war.
Intensified research
In addition, resistance research in general, and specifically research into church "resistance", has become increasingly specialised over the years and has become more and more precise thanks to theoretical and methodological considerations. To name just one example, research into so-called socio-moral milieus in the 1990s drew a more precise picture of the socio-cultural foundations for possible resistance in the Church in the area of Catholicism.
On the basis of such research, the question has been critically raised as to what extent the "oppositional" behaviour of Catholics had a goal beyond the preservation of their own milieu, whether what we perhaps too hastily describe as ecclesiastical resistance did not actually spring from a "milieu egoism". So not a fight for human rights or against anti-human policies, just a fight to preserve one's own milieu? And that, according to another critical perspective, could ultimately have been just a fight against modernity, as the church had already waged in various fields.
Somewhat earlier, research had addressed the problem that resistance can have a variety of forms and manifestations, so that it seems sensible to differentiate the term. This was not done, as Olaf Blaschke surmised in 2010, in order to ensure that "Catholics and the official church could continue to feel comfortable under the spacious umbrella of resistance [...] in the face of growing contradictory source findings", so that "as many variants, subspecies or at least phenomena resembling resistance as possible were discovered" with a great deal of "creativity" and confused the uninformed observer.
Rather, the many variants of the proposed stage models of resistance arose from the insight that not every kind of non-conformist behaviour should be labelled with the big word "resistance", especially as a large, roughly simultaneous project of the Institute for Contemporary History in Bavaria during the Nazi era also attempted to conceptualise small forms of civil courage and dissociative behaviour in the face of the demands of the Nazi state by introducing the concept of resistance, and at the same time to develop a theory of social behaviour under the conditions of a modern totalitarian dictatorship.
The fact that the diversity of resistant behaviour in reality cannot be captured clearly by such models, and the problem of the complex motives of the "resisters", have long made these attempts questionable. Nonetheless, Olaf Blaschke has called for a step-by-step model of resistance by Catholics to be supplemented by a step-by-step model of adaptation by Catholics in the Nazi regime in order to counter the image of a Catholic Church in resistance to National Socialism, which in his opinion is still one-sidedly prevalent.
To this end, he proposes to use a model of collaboration by Catholics with the stages "active collaboration", "consensus/loyalty", "cooperation/adaptation" and "selective satisfaction" as a supplement to the model by Klaus Gotto, Hans Günter Hockerts and Konrad Repgen, which divides resistance into the four stages of "selective non-conformity", "refusal", "public protest" and "resistance in the narrower sense".
Such a proposal seems logical, as the complicity of a part of the Catholic population in the Nazi state has already been the subject of various debates and a consistent application would have to lead to a differentiated social history of National Socialism, in which Catholics would only be one of several large social groups in which there were also "naysayers". This would at least be more expedient than defining an ever-growing list of conditions and prerequisites as to when one can still speak of Catholic resistance, as other authors suggest.
Thinking back to the Königsbach pastor Martin, who was so severely abused in 1933 because of his anti-Nazi stance, one wonders, against the background of this research development, where he would be categorised now. In any case, he would no longer be so easy to categorise as a resister and persecuted person after the various objections described above. So was he in the camp of the followers, the conformists, the National Socialists? Hardly.
New approaches
Against this backdrop, a suggestion made around three years ago by Olaf Blaschke and Thomas Großbölting in their collective publication Was glaubten die Deutschen zwischen 1933 und 1945? Religion and Politics under National Socialism. They are also of the opinion that our thinking about the church and National Socialism is still too much characterised by dichotomous ideas - National Socialism here, the church there - and suggest a change of perspective: "The change of perspective consists in the fact that the 'political religion' of National Socialism is not considered per se to be incompatible with the 'religious religion' of Christianity or other religious communities.
Instead, the 'interplay' of religious and political identities should take centre stage analytically [...]. This approach offers the opportunity to heuristically overcome the conventional and deeply rooted dichotomy of 'cross and swastika' and to openly question the relationship between religion and political worldview." For even for many Catholics, according to the basic assumption, National Socialism and the Christian faith did not necessarily represent a contradiction, but rather mixed situations, cooperation and hybrid relationships characterised the everyday lives of Christians.
This proposal therefore recommends not only focussing on the abused priest in the example described at the beginning, but also on the many Königsbach Catholics who did not help their priest and on the violent SS people, among whom there were also some Catholics. According to the thesis, the reality of life for Catholics in the "national community" of the "Third Reich" showed much more arrangement with the new system than opposition to it, was much more concerned with reconciliation than distancing, sought compatibility rather than resistance and sacrificial demarcation.
This is not entirely new, as older research also spoke of partial resistance or partial resistance when it came to characterising the ideological mixtures of resistant people, but Blaschke and Großbölting's approach is more pointed and therefore analytically more precise.
Similar to Blaschke and Großbölting, Christiane Hoth and Markus Raasch used the example of the episcopal city of Eichstätt in 2017 to illustrate the added value that such a slight change of perspective can have. To this end, Hoth and Raasch once again utilised the concept of milieu, emphasising the distinction between different Catholic regional milieus, but unlike in the 1990s, they did not only examine the possible destruction caused by Nazi policies, i.e. the competitive situation, as it were, but rather asked how "intensive the formative power of National Socialist convictions" was among Catholics and "what reach" these had in the Catholic milieu in Eichstätt.
The aim was therefore to explore the coexistence, cooperation and opposition between the Catholic milieu and National Socialism and thus to write a history of everyday life and society in a limited historical area, taking into account the regional specifics. This concept is also based on the research paradigm of the "Volksgemeinschaft" (people's community), which has been the subject of intensive research for a number of years and focuses on the question of how the numerically highly relevant religious milieus were actually to be included in the fiction of a National Socialist "people's community" in practice, which was unavoidable if the propagated vision was to become a reality of any kind.
Hoth's and Raasch's work makes it easy to recognise where the points of entry into the Catholic milieu were, where compromises of the milieu became conceivable for the sake of inclusion in the "national community", but also where the demarcation, the opposition seemed unbridgeable, and for what reasons this happened. It remains to be seen whether the precision of this approach can be surpassed by using social science methods to investigate people's actual attitudes towards Nazi rule behind their formal party membership or refusal to join, as has recently been attempted.
In any case, these are fruitful, further-reaching approaches that have the advantage with regard to resistance research that they enable a defusing of the often overly polemical research discussion and bundle different perspectives, even enabling a differentiated social history of National Socialism. From the perspective of such research, one would probably have to answer the question posed at the outset as to where Catholics stood in National Socialism: in the centre of the imagined "national community" and within it among the enthusiasts, the active and silent supporters as well as among the wait-and-see/indifferent and some also among the "resisters".
What remains of the resistance of "the" Catholics?
Nevertheless, the question remains as to where we should ultimately place the obvious injustice done to Father Martin in Königsbach in 1933, his clear opposition to National Socialism, and how we should interpret the many testimonies of martyrdom taken upon themselves by Catholics that can be found in the martyrology of the Catholic Church. Can or should we rather no longer refer to all this as "resistance" and "persecution", because the behaviour of "Catholics in resistance", which often appears exemplary and courageous, dissolves into a complex and highly differentiated social history of National Socialism, which actually tends to have many more ever darker shades of grey?
It is not easy to answer this question, and from the point of view of resistance research, it is also unsatisfactory that the sometimes exceptional behaviour of people in extreme situations, which endangered their own existence, is now in danger of being levelled and devalued. Even if general resistance research no longer propagates "shining resistance heroes", but has undergone research developments similar to those described for the contemporary history of Catholicism, the extraordinary nature of the historical act of risking one's own life remains both a fact and a fascination in need of explanation.
Nevertheless, this impression, which occasionally arises in the research discussion, need not exist if the relevant research is really open, indeed sensitive enough, to all forms of social action and neither one-sidedly emphasises the "resistance" nor the "adaptation" of Catholics under National Socialism. Much would be achieved if the focus were not on equal judgements and categorisations, but rather on processual aspects, and continuities and discontinuities were seen in equal measure.
At a time when we can observe the systematic repression of opposition forces in Russia and the courage it takes to speak out publicly against the war in Ukraine, even with a blank sheet of paper, this should perhaps be easier to do again. In doing so, it helps to realise some fundamental insights that have been known for a long time but are often ignored:
1) The term "resistance" has always been problematic and implies moral judgements - no matter how much differentiation is made, it will be difficult to counter this. Those who opposed the Nazi regime and are honoured every year with the memorial service in the Bendlerblock on 20 July were, according to popular perception, on the right side and can claim a high level of moral respect for themselves. It is to be expected that this will give rise to critical questions about the justification of this valorisation. On the other hand, however, it is hard to get by without this term because it can be used in everyday life to clarify what is meant in a way that few other terms can.
2) The idea that the Catholic Church stood in resistance to National Socialism has always been wrong. Hans Maier pointed out years ago that it was "hardly realistic" for a church as a whole to "join the resistance."
3. when it comes to the question of the motivation for resistant behaviour, it cannot be assumed per se that it was solely the Christian faith that automatically generated the resistant behaviour, as it were. Martin Greschat has therefore said that the Christian element in the motivation for resistant behaviour is rarely found purely, but usually in the form of "amalgams". Resistance can therefore be motivated in many different ways, but conversely it can also be broken or relativised by realities of life of a completely different kind beyond faith.
4 Against this background, it is always necessary to clarify what exactly is meant when we speak of the Catholic Church or Catholics in resistance. The Catholic Church is organised hierarchically: the Pope in Rome, then the bishops in Germany, the priests and the highly heterogeneous mass of believers - they all had varying degrees of responsibility and scope for action. This, too, must always be differentiated when talking about resistance in the Catholic milieu.
It should also be noted that the findings of historical election research, as presented by Jürgen Falter decades ago, as well as his most recent research on NSDAP membership, have in no way lost their significance. In July 1932, only 17 % of NSDAP voters were Catholics; in March 1933, at the last election, which was no longer free, "only" one in four NSDAP voters were Catholics. And even if you ask about party membership, it is noticeable that Catholics were strongly underrepresented among the PGs before 1933.
This all indicates that Catholics in Germany - for a variety of reasons - were not among the most important supporters of the Nazi state. At the same time, it is true that Catholics were also able to participate in the Nazi "people's community" and find a way to somehow reconcile their faith with the political demands of the NSDAP. It should be noted that the proportion of Catholics in the Nazi organisations increased over the course of the dictatorship, but never formed the majority overall.
Finally, and above all, it cannot be denied that deep roots in the Christian faith and the Catholic tradition had the potential to motivate resistance in a broader and narrower sense. What was preached in the churches, apart from the undisputedly very few really brown priests, was a kind of counter-world of values to National Socialism which, if one really took it seriously
and made it the guiding principle of their own lives, always had to cause contradictions in everyday life in National Socialist Germany for the faithful, which ultimately led to resistance in some people. This is the real reason why it is worth dealing with the topic of "Christian/Catholic resistance" in the Third Reich at all.
Of course, there was no automatism at work here, and there is no doubt that, against the background of the development of research, it is always necessary to look at more than the resistance event itself, to illuminate the background, the framework conditions, the everyday reality of the resisters, in order to obtain as precise an idea as possible not only of the motivation behind the resistant behaviour, but also to illuminate the place in the reality of the resisters' lives.
In the Christian interpretation of the world, there was at least a basis that could (but did not have to!) motivate a different way of thinking. This is probably what Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, the driving force behind the resistant Kreisau Circle, recognised in a letter to his friend Lionel Curtis in 1942. Moltke diagnosed a gradual awakening of the German population against the regime and its ideology a little too hopefully.
Moltke: "The backbone of this movement is formed by the two Christian denominations, Protestant and Catholic. The Catholic churches are full every day, the Protestant ones not yet, but the development is perceptible. [...] Perhaps you remember that in conversations before the war I was of the opinion that faith in God was not essential to get to where we are now. Today I know that I was wrong, completely wrong. You know that I fought the Nazis from day one, but the degree of danger and sacrifice that is required of us today, and may be required of us tomorrow, demands more than good ethical principles, especially since we know that the success of our struggle will probably mean total collapse as a national entity."
