This now emerged in an issue at the very heart of the regime’s ideology as, in midsummer 1941, serious disquiet over the ‘euthanasia action’ came out into the open. All too credible rumours about the killing of asylum patients had been circulating since summer 1940. Taking place in selected asylums within Germany, in close reach of major centres of population, it had been impossible to keep the ‘action’ as close a secret as had been intended. Those in the immediate vicinity saw the grey buses arrive, the patients unload and enter the asylum, the crematorium chimneys continually smoking.176 Occasionally, as at Absberg in Franconia in February 1941, there had been public demonstrations of sympathy for the victims as they were loaded on to the buses to take them to what everyone knew was a certain death.177 The secrecy, and absence of any public statement, let alone law, authorizing what was known to be happening, stoked the fires of alarm. Protest letters landed in the Reich Chancellery and the Reich Justice Ministry. Some were even from dyed-in-the-wool National Socialists.178 Others, on occasion not mincing words, were from prominent churchmen.179 But the churchmen up to this point had kept their protests confidential. On 7 July a pastoral letter from German bishops was read out in Catholic churches, declaring that it was wrong to kill except in war or for self-defence.180 But this veiled attempt to criticize the ‘euthanasia action’ left no obvious mark. The death-mills stayed working.
Then, on 3 August 1941, Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen, the Catholic Bishop of Münster in Westphalia, referring to the pastoral letter, in a most courageous sermon in the St Lamberti Church in Münster, openly denounced in plain terms what was happening. Galen, deeply conservative, anti-liberal, and anti-socialist, had been thought in some Church circles in the 1930s even to be a Nazi sympathizer.181 In June 1941, like some other Catholic bishops, he had welcomed the attack on the Soviet Union and offered his prayers for the ‘successful defence against the Bolshevik threat to our people’.182 But by July, as Münster suffered under a hail of British bombs, he delivered a series of sermons denouncing in the most forthright terms the Gestapo’s suppression of religious orders in the city.183
On 14 July, a day after a sermon attacking the closure of the monasteries, Galen sent a telegram to the Reich Chancellery requesting Hitler to defend the people against the Gestapo. The following Sunday, 20 July, he read out the telegram in church. Two days later he wrote to Lammers with what could only be seen as a criticism of Hitler and his state. The Führer’s involvement with foreign and military matters was such, Galen remarked, that he was not in a position to deal with all the petitions and complaints sent to him. ‘Adolf Hitler is not a divine being, raised above every natural limitation, who is able to keep an eye on and direct everything at the same time. However, when as a result of this overloading with work of the responsible leader… the Gestapo shatters unrestrained the home front… then I know (I am called upon)… to raise my voice loudly.’184
Popular unrest at the closing of the monasteries was also brought to Hitler’s attention by Lammers on 29 July while a protest by Bishop Franz Rudolf Bornewasser of Trier was being discussed. It seems likely that Galen’s telegram, and the contents of his letter to Lammers, were referred to Hitler at the same time. Bishop Bornewasser’s confidential protest had already linked the unrest over the closing of monasteries to the disquiet about the killing of ‘unworthy life’. Galen now did the same — but in public. His fury over the dissolution of the monasteries lit the fuse for his open assault on the Nazi ‘euthanasia programme’.185
