Free Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 by Saul Friedländer Page A

Protestant clergyman, Bishop Otto Dibelius, justified the new regime’s actions, denying that there was any brutality even in the concentration camps and asserting that the boycott—which he called a reasonable defensive measure—took its course amid “calm and order.” 3 His broadcast was no momentary aberration. A few days later Dibelius sent a confidential Easter message to all the pastors of his province: “My dear Brethren! We all not only understand but are fully sympathetic to the recent motivations out of which the völkisch movement has emerged. Notwithstanding the evil sound that the term has frequently acquired, I have always considered myself an anti-Semite. One cannot ignore that Jewry has played a leading role in all the destructive manifestations of modern civilization.” 4
    The Catholic Church’s reaction to the boycott was not fundamentally different. On March 31, at the suggestion of the Berlin cleric Bernhard Lichtenberg, the director of the Deutsche Bank in Berlin and president of the Committee for Inter-Confessional Peace, Oskar Wassermann, asked Adolf Johannes Cardinal Bertram, chairman of the German Conference of Bishops, to intervene against the boycott. Himself reticent about intervening, Bertram set about asking other senior German prelates for their opinions by stressing that the boycott was part of an economic battle that had nothing to do with immediate church interests. From Munich, Michael Cardinal Faulhaber wired Bertram: HOPELESS. WOULD MAKE THINGS WORSE. IN ANY CASE ALREADY DYING DOWN . For Archbishop Conrad Gröber of Freiburg, the problem was merely that converted Jews among the boycotted merchants were also being damaged. 5 Nothing was done.
    In a letter addressed at approximately the same time to the Vatican’s secretary of state, Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, Faulhaber wrote: “We bishops are being asked why the Catholic Church, as often in its history, does not intervene on behalf of the Jews. This is not possible at this time because the struggle against the Jews would then, at the same time, become a struggle against the Catholics, and because the Jews can help themselves, as the sudden end of the boycott shows. It is especially unjust and painful that by this action the Jews, even those who have been baptized for ten and twenty years and are good Catholics, indeed even those whose parents were already Catholics, are legally still considered Jews, and as doctors or lawyers are to lose their positions.” 6
    To the clergyman Alois Wurm, founder and editor of the periodical Seele (Soul), who asked why the church did not state openly that people could not be persecuted because of their race, the Munich cardinal answered in less guarded terms: “For the higher ecclesiastical authorities, there are immediate issues of much greater importance; schools, the maintaining of Catholic associations, sterilization are more important for Christianity in our homeland. One must assume that the Jews are capable of helping themselves.” There is no reason “to give a pretext to the government to turn the incitement against the Jews into incitement against the Jesuits.” 7
    Archbishop Gröber was no more forthcoming when he stated to Robert Leiber, a Jesuit who was to become the confessor of Pius XII: “I immediately intervened on behalf of the converted Jews, but so far have had no response to my action…. I am afraid that the campaign against Judah will prove costly to us.” 8
    The main issue for the churches was one of dogma, particularly with regard to the status of converted Jews and to the links between Judaism and Christianity. The debate had become particularly acute within Protestantism, when, in 1932, the pro-Nazi German Christian Faith Movement published its “Guidelines.” “The relevant theme was a sort of race conscious belief in Christ; race, people and nation as part of a God-given ordering of life.” 9 Point 9 of “Guidelines,” for example,