Mitläufer, Feiglinge, Antisemiten? Katholische Kirche und Nationalsozialismus (review)

In this book the German historian Michael Feldkamp examines what he calls at the outset the "central question: did the Catholic Church fall short of its moral and spiritual task during the Nazi period?" (p. 12). The book has striking similarities to the 2002 work by José M. Sánchez, Pius XII and the Holocaust: Understanding the Controversy (reviewed ante LXXXIX [April, 2003], 326–27).

Feldkamp extends his investigation wider than Sánchez did, however, examining not only the role of the pope but also that of the German bishops, clergy, and Catholic people. Written for a popular audience, the book lacks footnotes, making it impossible to verify the sources even of direct citations. A select bibliography of "recommended further reading" lists seventy-six exclusively German titles from the vast literature on the subject.

To the question posed by his title, whether the Church resisted the Nazis, or whether Catholics, from the pope to ordinary believers, consisted of fellow travelers, cowards, and antisemites, Feldkamp answers that there is evidence of all these responses, but also of heroic resistance including martyrdom. The record, he writes, is too mixed to permit generalizations or summary judgments. His purpose in writing is to show that today's widely disseminated and generally believed one-sided and biased presentations of the period reflect rejection of the now richly documented historical record in favor of contemporary prejudice and political correctness. These popular accounts, he writes, would be unrecognizable to those who actually experienced Hitler.

Absent from such accounts is any mention of the 1928 declaration of the Holy Office (today the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) quoted by Feldkamp on page 40:"Motivated by charity, the Holy See has protected the Jewish people from violence, and it condemns in particular the hatred of the people chosen of old by God which is called anti-Semitism."

Absent, too, is the steadfast refusal of Catholic voters to support the Nazi party throughout the Weimar period. Even in the parliamentary election of March 5, 1933, with Hitler in power and Nazi thugs already intimidating people, Germany's two Catholic parties experienced only a small decline in the support they had previously received. Feldkamp summarizes the issue as follows: "Catholics did not help Hitler into the saddle. They were conservative, authoritarian, firm in their national and local loyalties. But they opposed innovations and radicalism" (p. 45).

Regarding the Concordat of July 1933, although critics have long called it a "pact with Hitler," it was, in reality, an instrument of defense: the legal recognition by the German State of the Catholic Church's right to existence and religious freedom. Like previous authors, Feldkamp disposes easily of the charge that the Vatican "sold out" the Catholic Center Party for the sake of the Concordat. This claim originated with Germany's last pre-Nazi chancellor, Heinrich Brüning, a courageous and honorable man whose memoirs, however, written years later in American exile, are replete with numerous verifiable errors.

The initiative for the Concordat came from Hitler. Had the Vatican spurned his offer, he would have attacked the Church with a propaganda campaign pointing out that he had offered peace, only to have it rejected. Without the Concordat, Hitler would have dismissed the Holy See's repeated protests of Nazi harassment of the Church as illegal interference in Germany's internal affairs. These protests culminated in the searing indictment of Nazi faithlessness in the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, drafted by Cardinal and Vatican Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII) together with Munich's Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber and four other German bishops, and issued by Pope Pius XI on March 14, 1937.

Feldkamp identifies four levels of resistance to Hitler by Catholics: protests against particular aspects of Nazi policy; refusal (through continued loyalty to the Church and other means) to join in Hitler's demand for full participation of all institutions and persons in his movement of...