10_Minorities_Religion

58%-Prostentants 32%-Catholics -Churches_Todd

Some religious groups refused to compromise with the regime and were deported to
concentration camps (Jehovah’s Witnesses).
The mainstream Churches proved much easier to influence. (Bisericele mai
princioale s-au dovedit a fi mult mai usor de influentat).
This is partly because the Protestant and Catholic churches shared a good deal of common
ideological ground with Nazism, in their dislike of Marxism, their conservatism, belief in
family values and underlying anti-Semitism (even if in principle they spoke against it).

However, Hitler’s determination to set up an Aryanised social community left little

room for religion. He feared an outright on the Churches would do more harm than good, but
he wanted to restrict the Churches to a purely spiritual role. This ran counter to the desire of
most churchmen to maintain the Church’s role in other activities as youth groups.

German Protestantism was associated with patriotic support for the state, nationalism and
right-wing political views. So, like the Nazis, German Protestants disliked the political left
and Marxism. The Roman Catholic Church was also anti-Bolshevist and ken to show its
national loyalty.

The Protestant Church

The Protestant Church, which had Lutheran and Calvinist branches, had never been
fully united and, with the rise of Nazism, a ‘German Christian’ movement emerged calling for
a new national ‘People’s Church’. This was mainly supported by young pastors and theology
who saw the Nazis ‘national uprising’ as the opportunity for religious as well as political
renewall. The German Christians described themselves as the SA of the Church and
adopted uniforms, marches and salutes. Their motto was ‘’the swastika on our breasts and
the cross in our hearts’’.

May 1933- Hitler set up the Reich Church with the help of German Christians
Appointed a Reich bishop to coordinate the Protestant churches under his
authority.

Sept 1933- was set up the Pastror’s Emergency League to resist the German Christians and
defend traditional Lutheranism.
Some members of this League were arrested, including Bishop Meiser of Bavaria
and Bishop Wurm of Wuttemberg in 1934, provoking mass demonstrations.

Oct 1934- The Pastors’ Emergency League formally broke with the Reich Church to form
their own Confessional Church.
This led Hitler to abandon his attempt to impose direct control on the Protestant Church
through the Reich bishops.
This left the Protestant Church divided into three:
● The ‘official ’ Reich Church under Muller, which cooperated with the regime but tried
to retain organisational autonomy
● The German Christians, who tried to control the Reich Church but whose influence
declined
● The Confessional Church, which formed an oppositional Church and was subject to
harassment from both the state and other Church authorities but had strong support
in some areas.

From 1934, the Church suffered less from direct prosecution than from attempts to
curb its activities.
Confessional schools - (a state school in which specific Church teaching was
allowed) abolished, religious teaching downgraded in schools, and young people
were punished to attend Youth organisations.
The weakening of the church was sporadic and unco-ordinated because of the way
the Nazi state was run.

The Catholic Church

-agreed on the dissolution of the Centre Party

-signed the concordat (july 1933)
According to the Concordat, the Vatican recognised the Nazi regime and promised
not to interfere in politics. In return, the state promised not to interfere in the Catholic Church,
which would keep control over its educational, youth and communal organisations.

However, Nazis:
-used propaga. insulting the clergy and Catholic practices to encourage anti-Catholic feeling
-Catholic school were closed and had almost disappeared by 1939
-Cath. Organisations and societies were also removed
Ex:in 1936, Church youth org. Were disbanded when the Hitler youth became compulsory

1937-Pope Pius XI attacked Nazi beliefs in public in Catholic churches

Pius XII, failed to condemn Naz. and has been criticised for his tolerance of the regime

Bishop Galen’s protest against euthanasia in 1941 was the most outspoken criticism to
come from a Catholich prelate.

The German Faith Movement, neo-Paganism and ,,positive Christianity’’

Mid 1930s- a ,,Church Secession’’ campaign deliberately encouraged Germans to abandon

the Churches
German Faith Movement- embraced several beliefs that fitted well with Nazism, including a
belief in Blut und Boden ideology and the rejection of Christian ethics. It had aprox.
200 000 supporters and was particularly strong among the SS.
Paganism also influenced policy (carols and nativity plays were banned and the word
,,Christmas’’ was forbidden and replaced by Yuletide in the new years).

As organisations, Churches almost completely surrendered to the Nazi political leadership,

although the breakway Confessional Church and some individual clergymen were able to
stand out as symbols of religious opposition to Nazism. However, church attendance
remained steady, and even increased in the war years, making Christian belief an obstacle
to a fully totalitarian state.

-Layton_Minorities

The war proved a great destroyer of social convention in Germany. Manpower had
huge gaps as the lists of war dead lengthened. These gaps could be filled in only one way:
German women would produce children in such numbers that Germany’s future could be
secured. But there were’n enough married couples (because of men’s death) so Himmler
appealed to women to make themselves pregnant outside the normal confines of marriage.
‘’Sublime task’’
1944-The Ministry of justice backed him by ruling that the leaders of Gerjmany’s youth
movements were acting wholly legally in arguing the girls to have unmarried sex in order to
,,donate a child to the Furher’’.

But the Nazis found it impossible to sustain their traditional policies towards women in the
face of a war that ultimately destroyed German society.

Treatement of Minorities

Nazi racial theory held that ‘undiserables’, a term which covered the seriously handicapped
and racial inferiors, were expendable.

1933-Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring

People suffering from special diseases, such as epilepsy, deafness and blindness,
undergo sterilisation.

By 1939, 350 000 sterilisations had taken place

 Euthanasia

1939- Hitler gave instructions that a programme of ,,mercy killing’’ was to be implemented

An organisation, code-named T4, was commissioned to oversee the elimination of

defectives.

T4:
● Relied on the co-operation of the medical profession
● Set up seven killing centres at various places in Germany which presented
themselves as hospitals or clinics

70 000 deaths during the period of Third Reich

The relatives of those who had been killed were informed that the patient had regrettably
died from „breathing problems’’.
What such euphemism indicated was that the authorities knew that if the true nature
of their programme of death was made public it would be impossible to continue with it. The
result was a conspiracy of silence among a large part of the medical profession. Death
certificates were completed in such a way that they hid the real causes of death.
The T4 administration issued doctors with a set of 60 suggested formulae from which
to choose according to the age and previous condition of the deceased.

Resistance to the programme

Some doctors did protest by refusing to participate in the programme.

Others, without openly disobeying the authorities, found ways of saving some of their
patients (claiming that listed inmates were so important as maintenance workers or
assistants to the staff that the asylum could not afford to lose them.). Ost of the staff,
however remained silent and participated in the programme.

The many relatives that demanded the deaths of members of their family to be fully
explained had the standart response: commiseration from authorities with the family and
then use threats if they persisted with their questions.
Strong-arm tactics were also used the inhabitants of areas near the extermination centres
who asked what was going on. In localities where were crematoriums, people protested but
after that they were visited by T4 administrators who told them that if they continued to
complain they would be imprisoned.

Religious protests

When information about the sterilization and euthanasia programme did leak out, there were
a number of spirited protests. Some Protestant and Catholic clergy spoke out against it from
the pulpit. Some of them were sent to prison for these acts.
Bernhard Lichtenberg, a Catholic priest, condemned the euthaanasia programme and asked
that the Reich’s physician-in-cheif should be charged with the murder of the mentally
disabled.

Clemens von Galen-the Bishop of Munster

On learning that asylums within hos own diocese included the euthanasia programme,
angrly denounced it. His denounciations became a campaign against state-directed
euthanasia. He warned that if the programme continued Germany would sink into ,,moral
depravity’’. Many Nazis wanted von Galen forcibly removed, but Hitler decided otherwise.
Taking into account the residual sense of decency of most Germans and aware of the moral
authority that the Bishop possesses among Catholics, Hitler considered it more prudent to
withdraw.
august 1941- he issued an order suspending the operation T4 and thereby ended the
euthanasia programme.

The persecution of the Jews

Although the jews made up scarely 1% of the German populatin, they were subject to
systematic persecution from 1933 onwards. However, there is no evidence that the physical
annihilation of the Jews was planned from the beggining. Rather it was cumulative process
with the persecution increasing stage by stage until, with the coming of the war, all restrains
on Nazi behaviour were removed. Claiming that the Jews represented a mortal threat in
Germany’s time of crisis, the Nazis emberked on what they called the ,,Final Solution’’.

There is no record of Hitler’s ordering the Final Solution, but his hatred intensified the
German detestation of the Jews and, therefore, he must bear the ultimate responsability for
what happened.

,,Cumulative radicalization’’- the system under which officials, eager ,,to work towards the
Furher’’ turned his vague ideas into deadly policies. (politici
morale)

The major stages in the persecution

1933
● Goebbels began to organise open violence against Jews
● Jews were barried from positions in the civil service and the professions
 1935

The Nunberg Race Laws created a systematic programme for depriving Jews of legal
and civil rights.
● Marriage and sexual relations between Jews and Germans were forbidden
● Full Jews were deprived of German citizenship
● Full Jews were defined as those having three or four Jewish grandparents

1938
● Jewish doctors were debarred from medical practice
● Jewish businesses were forbidden to operate
● Jewish students were dismissed from state school and universities
● A strict curfew was imposed on Jews living in towns and cities
● 18,000 Polish Jews resident in Germany were forcibly expelled

It is clear that by 1938 Hitler wanted the Jews removed from Germany and considered mass
migration as a possibility.
April 1938, Goebbels: The Furher wants gradually to push them all out. Negotiate with
Poland and Romania. Madagascar would be the most suitable for them’’.
The coming of war in 1939 and international law meant that such a policy was never
implemented.

Kristallnacht
The expulsion of Polish Jews was the prelude to the Nazis’ most openly violent anti-Jewish
action yet. In protest at the expulsions, a young Jewish man assasinated a German diplomat
in Paris. Exploiting this as a pretext for relation, the Nazis unleashed what became known as
,,Kristallnacht’’
9-10 Nov 1938-over 1000 Jews were killed in a series of violent attacks and 20 000 were
arrested, with the majority being sent to concentration camps.
Houses were smashed, shops were looted and synagogues desecrated.

1939
The outbreak of war in 1939 had the effect of intensifying the anti-Jewish persecution which
had been building since 1933. Hitler prepared the German people that if the conflict came it
would be the Jewish who had caused it. This gave him the excuse to claim that war would
offer the German people the chance to exact revenge for the Jew’s leading the nation to
defeat in 1918.

1939-1942
The occupation of eastern Europe by German armies between 1939-1942 provided the
opportunity for annihilation. Deportations and killings became more organised and more
widespread. Special SS units followed the German forces as they marched into Poland and
the Soviet Union and killed thousands of Jews.
 1942: The ,,Final Solution’’
Jan 1942- Wannese conference
Spokesman:Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann

Heydrich defined the Nazi objectives: Europe from east to west was to be ,,cleansed’’
of its 11 million Jews.
(In a planned operation they were to be transported to eastern Europe where they
would be made to work until they dropped dead from exhaustion and hunger. Any
Jews who survived this would be systematically exterminated.)

Robert Ley: ,,It is not enough to isolate the Jewish enemy, the Jews got to be exterminated.’’

1942-1945: The Holocaust

Within months of the Wanesse Conference, special concentration camps were estabilished
to carry out methodical mass extermination.
By the end of the war some 6 million Jews had been murdered in camps.

Persecution of other minorities

Attention has rightly been paid to the Holocaust as the most distructive of Hitler’s
race policies, but racial discrimination and persecution were directed towards all those he
regarded as racial inferiors or ‘asocial degenerates’. This explains the treatment of:
● The Roma gypsies-23% of the Roma that have been living in Europe were
killed in the Nazi extermination campaign.

● Homosexuals- 50,000 men were convicted of ‘indecency’; of these some

15, 000 were put in concentration camps where part of their degradation was
to be made to wear pink triangle. Homosexuals who did not ‘come out’ were
usually not hunted down. Although female homosexuality was unlawful, there
is no recorded case of a women being prosecuted for this.

● Jehova’s Witnesses- 2 000 were murdered under the Nazi regime, 250
specifically for refusing to be conscripted. Those Witnesses who were
prepared to sign allegiance to the regime were left untouched.

● ‘Rhineland bastards’- this was Hitler’s term for the mixed-race children. For
expedient reasons, since he looked for support from anti-British Arab leaders,
Hitler publicly played down his distaste for Arabs. Yet, since they, like Jews,
were semitic people, his-anti-Semitism included them as well. Among the first
victims of the Nazi sterilization programme were the mixed-race Rheineland
children.