Hitler’s Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism (review)

While working on his earlier Resisting the Third Reich: Catholic Clergy in Hitler’s Berlin, 2004), Kevin Spicer discovered letters identifying Father Karl König from Paderborn as an ardent supporter of the Nazi state. Although Spicer knew of references by John Conway (The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 1933–1945–1968) and Guenter Lewy (The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, 1964) to such priests, he was still surprised: “I found it difficult to comprehend how a person ordained to serve others and preach Christ’s commandment of love could so wholeheartedly embrace [a] hate-filled ideology” (p. ix). Spicer is a Catholic priest as well as chair of the History Department at Stonehill College; his new book represents in part his exploration of the contradiction between his view of Christianity and that of the Nazi priests.

Spicer combed numerous archives in Germany, Austria, and the United States to document individual priests’ relationship to Nazism. He observes that “brown” priests aligned “traditional Catholic religious antisemitism” with “National Socialist racial antisemitism,” supporting David Kertzer’s contention in The Popes Against the Jews (2001) that no clear line separates the two. Spicer adds that “even today the Catholic hierarchy seems incapable of disengaging itself completely from [the] historical posture” that they differ entirely. He criticizes the Vatican’s 1998 statement We Remember for attributing “Nazi racial antisemitism solely to neopagan philosophy, as if the Church’s own theology at that time did not generate an equal, though variant, form of antisemitism.” He then adds that “in 2005 Benedict XVI reiterated this same impaired understanding . . . [at] the synagogue of Cologne” (p. 9). Such observations illustrate the courage and honesty that make Spicer’s book such an important contribution.

Spicer’s brown priests gave their blessing to Nazi Jew-hatred. In 1923 Father Joseph Roth published three articles in the Völkischer Beobachter (published together in the same year as Catholicism and the Jewish Question). Spicer explains that for Roth, “the Christian command to love one’s neighbor excluded Jews, because . . . every Jew was ‘already a latent danger for . . . religion and morality,’ and [so] ‘the Jewish race’ . . . had to be ‘eliminated from the public life and religion’ of the German Volk” (p. 43).

In his 1922 Jew and Christian, or to Whom Does World Dominion Belong? and his 1923 article “The Jewish Question from the Standpoint of the Church” Father Dr. Philipp Haeuser blamed Jews for the Weimar Republic: “What has been destroyed . . . during the last four years since the revolution must be credited . . . to the Jews. The Jew is now definitely master of the world. In economic and political life, the Christian has become his slave.” Though Haeuser’s work was recognized even then as controversial, Jew and Christian received the imprimatur of the Chancery of Regensburg (p. 109). In January 1924 Haeuser lauded Hitler’s recent putsch, predicting that “a storm must . . . violently [wash] away everything that is rotting and sick. . . . the roar of spring” (p. 111). In November 1933 Haeuser was a guest at the Reich Party Day in Nuremberg, where he received a silver medal personally from Hitler (p. 127), in turn lauding Hitler as “the Great German soul and the shining star in the spiritual heaven of the German Volk” (p. 128).

Nor did such enthusiasm wane. Father Richard Kleine parlayed his pro-Nazism into an affiliation with Walter Grundmann’s (Protestant) Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life, founded in 1939 (see Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany, 2008). Kleine’s 1939 essay “Was Jesus a Jew?” argued that the paternity of the Holy Spirit and the doctrine of immaculate conception spared Jesus this taint. The theologian Karl Adam responded, “I agree [that] Jesus was connected to Jewry only on his mother’s side, and that this mother . . . was also protected from the bad influences...