Berlin полностью

It must be emphasized that the courageous opposition of Niemoller and other Protestant dissenters like Dietrich Bonhöffer (of whom more below) was by no means typical. The vast majority of Berlin’s Protestant community supported the Nazi regime with varying degrees of enthusiasm. In the case of the so-called German Christians, the enthusiasm was very great indeed. They joined the Nazis in condemning “liberalism, Judaism, and Marxism,” insisting that it was the Christians’ duty to protect the Volk against pollution by racial and social inferiors. The German Christians held the majority in every Protestant parish in Berlin except for Dahlem.

A similar pattern of collaboration by the majority and resistance by a minority evolved within Berlin’s Catholic community, which constituted only 10 percent of the city’s total population. In July 1933 the Hitler regime concluded the Reichs-konkordat with the Vatican, which promised the clergy freedom in religious matters in exchange for their political compliance. The chief Vatican negotiator was Papal Nuncio Eugenio Pacelli, who later became Pius XII. As a recent biographer has noted, the treaty that Pacelli helped write represented “a reversal of the situation sixty years earlier, when German Catholics combated and defeated Bismrack’s Kulturkampf persecutions from the grass roots.” Initially, the clergy stuck to its part of the bargain, but increasingly the Nazi regime did not. In 1936 the government banned all Catholic youth groups and mandated Catholic youngsters’ participation in the Hitler Youth. Even more grievously, it dissolved all the confessional schools. Catholic papers were forbidden to publish anything but church news. Because some journals ventured beyond this restriction, all the Catholic papers were shut down. Berlin’s Bishop Konrad Count von Preysing responded with sermons accusing the regime of violating the Concordat. He received some support from Rome in the form of a papal encyclical, “Mit brennender Sorge” (1937), which chastised the Nazi state for its attacks on the church and its policies on race. Claiming that this papal initiative violated the Concordat, the regime prohibited publication of the encyclical and announced that it would no longer honor its agreement with the church. To show it meant business, the government brought trumped-up charges against a number of priests and nuns for “crimes against morality.”

The church fought these measures as best it could, but it carefully limited its struggle to the defense of Catholic interests and individuals. As an institution, the German Catholic church did not take a public stand against Nazi persecution of the Jews. True, a small group of Catholics around Prelate Bernard Lichtenberg at Berlin’s St. Hedwig’s Cathedral established a “Committee for the Assistance of Catholic Non-Aryans.” As the name suggests, however, this initiative was limited to converts to Catholicism. Its primary goal was to help impecunious Catholics of Jewish background assemble the financial wherewithal to emigrate.

Nazi pressure on the Jews of Germany increased dramatically in 1937/38, as the regime stepped up its efforts to drive these people from their country, minus their wealth. In March 1938 the Nazis imposed the “Law Regarding the Legal Status of Jewish Communities,” which deprived Jewish congregations of legal protection and forbade them from taxing their own members, thereby reducing them to penury. Shortly thereafter, Jews were ordered to report the value of their property to the regime, a measure obviously intended to make it easier for the government to confiscate their holdings. When Jews applied to emigrate they were required to inform the authorities about what they intended to take with them; valuables of any consequence had to stay in the Reich.

These regulations applied to native Jews whom the Reich wanted to be rid of. As for nonnative Jews, in autumn 1938 the regime suddenly deported some 17,000 Polish Jews to Poland, allowing them to take along no more than ten marks and a few basic necessities. Since Poland at first would not accept the deportees, they were stranded for days in a no-man’s-land along the border, without food and shelter. German-born Jews who watched the Poles being rounded up and deported saw a grim preview of their own fate—though many did not yet realize it.