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

Abstract

Resisting the Third Reich. The Catholic Clergy in Hitler's Berlin. By Kevin P. Spicer. (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press. 2004. Pp. xii, 254. $36.00.) In 1933 the majority of German Catholics greeted the Nazis' rise to power with enthusiasm. Hitler promised a new beginning, the restoration of Germany's place in world affairs, a bulwark against Communism, and strong leadership. All served to outweigh the reservations expressed by some of the bishops. The groundswell was enough to bring almost universal approval when Hitler offered to sign a Concordat with the Vatican in July, 1933. These warm expressions of support for the new regime by bishops and clergy, however, became a liability when Nazi policy increasingly launched anti-Catholic and anticlerical campaigns designed to undermine the Concordat's intentions. At the local level, the were often confronted with an undeclared war. How they dealt with the situation is the subject of Kevin Spicer's well-researched investigation. Forty years ago Guenter Lewy published the first English-language survey of the Catholic Church and the Third Reich, which was highly critical in tone. More recently, other American church historians have chastised the German Catholic leaders for not acting more forcefully to protest or resist the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Spicer, however, avoids any kind of wishful thinking about what might have happened if only, but rather examines the actual conduct of the Catholic milieu and explores the dilemmas confronting its clergy as the political situation became ever more confrontational. . He has chosen for his case study the diocese of Berlin. This can hardly be considered representative, since Catholics were a small minority in the nation's capital, where the spirit of Bismarck still reigned. Nevertheless, Spicer shows that the range of responses by the Berlin clergy to the Nazi onslaught was matched in other parts of the country. A very few gave openly fervent support to the Nazi regime, eagerly demonstrating their loyalty to the Fuhrer, down to the very end. Spicer's chapter on these brown priests breaks new ground. On the other side, only a few were clear-sighted enough to recognize the pernicious character of the Nazis' ideology and practices. The most notable example was that of Monsignor Bernhard Lichtenberg, whose combative willingness to challenge the Nazi state far outstripped that of the rest of the clergy in his diocese. Spicer devotes a whole chapter to his unique witness. The majority of the clergy, however, adopted a stance of passive withdrawal from politics, and a concentration on their pastoral duties in their parishes. Spicer makes use of the term Resistenz, as outlined by the noted German historian Martin Broszat, to describe this attempt by the clergy to protect the local Catholic mi lieu and their prized ministerial freedom. Spicer sees the outrageous murder of a leading Catholic layman in Berlin, Erich Klausener, on the occasion of the so-called Rohm putsch in June, 1934, as the turning point which cured most clergy of their illusions about the Nazi regime. …