Silent Night; Silent Church

By Steve Rodan

Christmas in Germany was celebrated by virtually everybody. The 60 million Christians in Hitler's Germany had no problem deifying a Jewish baby who became their messiah.

But that didn't mean that Jesus's co-religionists should be spared from persecution and death.

The Nazi regime, which declared itself Christian, reserved Christmas for brutality against Jews and others. Hitler commanded solid if not overwhelming support from the majority of Catholics and Protestants as well as their pastors. Even on the holiest day of its calendar, the German church saw no contradiction between Christ's call for love and peace and the destruction of the Jews. Indeed, many church leaders proclaimed themselves devout followers of the fuhrer. [1]

The German Evangelical Church was the largest in the country, with well over 25 million congregants. Many in the church flocked to Hitler years before he rose to become chancellor in 1933, when the evangelical church spawned the "German Christians" movement. The German Christians embraced Nazism and their anti-Semitic agenda as part of their faith.

No support from church leaders

For a while, the German Christians were opposed by the "Confessing Church," which refused to replace Christ with Hitler. This wing, which avoided protests, received virtually no support from church leaders who wanted to avoid conflict with Berlin at any cost.

The exception was in March 1935 when a protest of Nazism was read from the pulpits of Confessing churches. Hitler, who signed an agreement with the Vatican in 1933, acted with caution. The Gestapo responded by briefly taking into custody more than 700 pastors.

In 1937, the Roman Catholic Church read the papal encyclical "With Burning Anxiety," which obliquely criticized Berlin for violating his agreement with the pope. The Gestapo raided diocesan offices and confiscated the text. No arrests were made. The church, through its concordat, remained protected.

"The concordat was his [Hitler's] first international agreement, and it vastly enhanced his respectability in Germany and abroad," German historian Fritz Stern said. "A great moral authority had trusted his word." [2]

Whether Catholic or Protestant, church policy aimed to cooperate with Hitler, particularly in his genocidal agenda. The Christian leadership kept silent on dissent, including the White Rose movement, which denounced the regime and the Final Solution. All of the movement's members were executed in 1943. During that same year, the Protestant Church of Baden suspended Herman Maas as pastor after he was found to have helped Jews. A year later, the 67-year-old was sent to a labor camp in France.

Decorating the Christmas tree

Christmas usually marked the height of Nazi atrocities. Since his ascent to Nazi chief in 1921, Hitler, born a Catholic, used the holiday season to spread anti-Semitism, accusing Jewish shops of price-gouging and sending his troops to vandalize and boycott department stores and other businesses. [3]

As soon as he became chancellor, Hitler ordered the complete revision of Christmas. Gone was Jesus, his birth and his mother. Instead, the fuhrer, with scant protest from the churches, inserted the Aryan family as the symbol of the holiday. The Nazis, with help from the German Christians, also worked to remove the Old Testament from the Bible.

Christmas in German camps was particularly brutal. In Auschwitz, the SS erected a tree in the square and then placed the bodies of slave laborers underneath. During one Christmas, Poles were forced to a roll call in which a German translation of Pope Pius XII's proclamation was read. Forty-two prisoners were said to have been frozen to death. [4]

But sometimes the SS guards were said to have been moved by the Christmas spirit. Hanns Lilje, secretary-general of the German Student Christian movement and a dissident in the Confessing Church, was imprisoned in both Dachau and Buchenwald. On Christmas Eve 1944, the SS commandment unchained a musician awaiting execution and ordered him to play the violin for the others. Lilje was impressed. "In our case, however, the most remarkable thing was the sentimental softness which overcame our guards," Lilje recalled. [5]

Not coincidental

The "sentimental softness" was not coincidental. The Vatican and Berlin maintained a dialogue throughout the war. Recently unsealed files show that the pope worked hard not to anger Hitler, particularly when the lives of Jews were at stake. At the same time, a pecking order of Christian dissidents emerged. Some like Lilje and Maas, the latter, with friends who ranged from the British clergy to the Zionist movement, survived and were embraced by the church after the war.

Others were expendable. Edith Stein, a leading Catholic educator pleaded with Pius XI weeks after Germany turned into a dictatorship to raise his voice against the policies of the Third Reich, which threatened both Jews and Catholics.

"Everything that happened [in Germany] and continues to happen on a daily basis originates with a government that calls itself 'Christian,'" Stein wrote. [6]

Neither Pius nor his successor responded. Stein, 20 years after she left her native Judaism, was executed in Auschwitz in 1942. For decades, she was ignored by the church.

Hitler even appointed an intermediary to send messages to Pius XII, elected pope in 1939. This included a warning in 1943 not to protest the roundup of Jews in Italy. About 1,000 Jews were taken to Auschwitz and killed. The Vatican remained silent. [7]

In May 2020, the Catholic Church finally acknowledged the obvious. The Council of Catholic Bishops admitted that the church worked fully with Hitler during World War II, including sending hundreds of priests to the front lines, converting church property into military hospitals and mobilizing tens of thousands of nuns as nurses.

 “Inasmuch as the bishops did not oppose the war with a clear ‘no,’" a 23-page report by the council said, "and most of them bolstered the [German nation’s] will to endure, they made themselves complicit in the war.” [8]

Notes

1. "Compliance and Confrontation." Victoria J. Barnett. Dimensions. Vol. 12. No. 2. Jan. 1, 1998.

2. Dreams and Delusions: The Drama of German History. Fritz Stern. Yale University Press. New Haven. 1999

3. "Christmas in Nazi Germany." Gerry Bowler. Oxford University Press Blog. Sept. 7, 2016. Christmas in Nazi Germany | OUPblog

4. "Christmas Eve in Auschwitz as Recalled by Polish Prisoners. Auschwitz Birkenau Memorial Museum. Dec. 23, 2005. News / Museum / Auschwitz-Birkenau

5. Waiting for the Light in Hitler's Prison. Philip Yancey. Christianity Today. Dec. 21, 2023. Waiting for the Light in Hitler’s Prison | Christianity Today

6. "Letter of Saint Edith Stein to Pope Pius XI in 1933." Carmelite Nuns of Baltimore. Feb. 23, 2003

7. "Scholars Are Learning More About What the Catholic Church Did—and Didn’t Do—to Save Jews During the Holocaust." Olivia B. Waxman. Time Magazine. April 17, 2023. Documents Reveal Catholic Church's Actions in the Holocaust | TIME]

8. "In 'confession of guilt,' German Catholic Church admits 'complicity' with Nazis." Times of Israel. May 2, 2020

Below; Catholic leaders salute Hitler. [Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München]