Roman Catholics, the Centre Party and Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany

Abstract

Catholic anti-Semitism in Germany has received nothing like the attention given to its counterparts in France and Austria, and the reasons for this are not hard to find. France and Austria were predominantly Catholic countries, whose indigenous traditions of anti-Semitism drew upon and reflected this background. This is true of the anti-Semitism espoused by the Croix de Feu and Austrian ‘clerical fascists’ in the interwar years; it is also true of the anti-Dreyfusard movement and Karl Lueger’s Christian Social Party in Vienna before 1914. The position in Germany was clearly very different. There Catholics themselves formed a minority, and were likely for that reason to be more circumspect about supporting political movements which preached anti-Semitism. It is well known that Catholics provided the National Socialists with very little of their popular electoral support prior to the seizure of power in 1933, just as few of them supported the anti-Semitic political parties of Stocker, Liebermann von Sonnenberg and others before 1914. They voted instead for the Centre, the party of German Catholics and one in which the role played by anti-Semitism has commonly been regarded by historians as slight.