Resisting the Third Reich: The Catholic Clergy in Hitler's Berlin (review)

Serious, nuts-and-bolts studies of German Roman Catholicism under the Third Reich, analyzing the political and historical relationships between Nazi leaders, the German Catholic episcopate, prominent lay Catholics, and key Vatican figures have been published in English since as early as 1962.¹ These studies rely largely (though not exclusively) on four general groups of source materials: public sermons, pastoral letters, and religious and secular newspapers; documents generated by Nazi-era government ministries and institutions, including police, legal, and administrative bodies; materials produced by the postwar occupiers; and documents gathered for use in postwar war crimes trials.

Michael Phayer's The Catholic Church and the Holocaust marked an important departure from previous English-language studies.² Phayer supplemented the rich palate of crucial primary source materials mentioned above by using, in addition, materials from the Caritas archive and the diocesan archives in Berlin and Munich, as well as private papers located in Germany and the United States. His study of the German hierarchy, authority figures in the Holy See's Secretariat of State, and Nazi leaders includes lesser-known historical actors such as Gertrud Luckner, Aloisius Muench, and Margarete Sommer. As a result, we begin to understand the dynamics that were operating "on the ground" as the institutional church, its hierarchy and clergy, and ordinary German Catholics faced the Nazi state and its legacy.

Using a similar approach, Kevin Spicer has undertaken research in six diocesan archives whose collections have been difficult for scholars to access in the past.³ Spicer was the first North American researcher to concentrate on the personal papers of ordinary prelates operating in parishes. He focuses his attention on the 260 active priests belonging to the diocese of Berlin, and, to a lesser extent, on their leaders. What emerges from his compelling study is a wrenching view of the inner workings of Roman Catholic clerical life in the extreme situation of totalitarian, National Socialist Germany.

Spicer's study reminds us that, under Nazi rule, German Catholics "had to make some hard choices, both personal and political" (p. 183). Despite the 1933 Concordat, the Nazi state quickly and increasingly became inhospitable to the free practice of the Catholic faith and open participation in Catholic cultural life. By 1935, Gestapo methods against those clerics deemed to be "political" enemies had become more heavy-handed (albeit inconsistently applied). By 1939, seventy-nine of the 260 priests studied (approximately 30 percent) had been "interrogated, warned, fined, arrested, imprisoned, transported to a concentration camp, or executed" by the Gestapo or other branches of the state (p. 73). Given that the consequences for openly voicing the differences between the Nazi and Catholic worldview were clear, it is remarkable that such a high percentage of priests were willing to do so.

These same priests, Spicer argues persuasively, considered themselves patriotic and loyal German citizens; they did not view themselves as engaging in political resistance. Even the most basic pastoral activities could (and did) result in arrest and death. One striking example was that of Father Bruno Schubert, pastor of Holy Trinity Church in Brandeburg-Havel. Schubert was arrested for providing pastoral care, food, religious items, and medicine to imprisoned fellow priests, and for "illegally mailing letters" for them. Ultimately, he perished in Gestapo custody (p. 93). Only one Berlin Catholic cleric, Monsignor Bernhard Lichtenberg, was arrested for public intervention on behalf of Jews. In November 1943, following years of intermittent conflict with the state, Monsignor Lichtenberg died while being transferred from the Wuhlheide work camp to Dachau.

Why did individual clerics make the choices they did—ranging from public opposition, to acquiescence, to outright support—in the face of Nazi power? Spicer reminds us that these men considered "proclaiming the gospel, administering the sacraments, ministering to the sick and dying, and ensuring that a new generation be instructed in...