A summary of the performance of the Churches under Nazism would be as follows: Nazism, in spite of originating largely in the Catholic areas of Germany, became a mass movement and a governing party in the Lutheran north, whereas they never cracked the Catholic vote until they outlawed the Catholic Centrum party. The Centrum not only held back Nazism in Bavaria and the Rhineland, it even established its own party militia when that became necessary - and its 100,000 stout young men actually forced the SA and SS to keep a low profile until the Nazis became the national government. A few Bishops had actually ordered that no Nazi should be buried in consecrated ground. Altogether, the Church and its political emanations had proved among the most dedicated enemies of Nazism so long as Nazism was not in power. The Lutheran churches, by contrast, were generally identified with the conservative right and looked on the new movement with a kind of fearful fascination.
Nazism began its rule by seeking a Concordat with the Vatican, to which the Vatican agreed - and breaking it before the ink was dry on the signatures. State pressure began piling up on the Churches immediately, with arrests and murders; and the Confessional Lutherans, having come to see all too clearly what was loose in Germany, staged their doomed attempt at forming an independent Church. This gave them honour, martyrdom, and no practical success.
Both Lutherans and Catholics, in general, tended to collaborate, because neither church was willing or able to establish a genuine opposition. But more outstanding Lutherans were wholly convinced supporters of Hitler than Catholics, and no Catholic leader of any importance ever gave himself away. The Nazi assault on the Catholic tyranny of Dollfuss in Austria showed the underlying hatred of the Party for the Catholic Church and horrified Catholics throughout the world. (Dollfuss, a strange kind of dictator whom even his enemies respected, was denied a priest and allowed to bleed to death for hours by Nazi thugs.) In 1937, Pope Pius XI's condemnation of the Nazi regime, the encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge, was smuggled into Germany by a masterpiece of secret planning, placed in the hands of every priest in the country, and read on the same Sunday from every pulpit: the worst slap in the face that Hitler suffered until the War. Even if the Lutherans had wanted to do anything like this, they would not have been able to, because they did not have the supranational organization of the Catholic Church.
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Nazism began its rule by seeking a Concordat with the Vatican, to which the Vatican agreed - and breaking it before the ink was dry on the signatures. State pressure began piling up on the Churches immediately, with arrests and murders; and the Confessional Lutherans, having come to see all too clearly what was loose in Germany, staged their doomed attempt at forming an independent Church. This gave them honour, martyrdom, and no practical success.
Both Lutherans and Catholics, in general, tended to collaborate, because neither church was willing or able to establish a genuine opposition. But more outstanding Lutherans were wholly convinced supporters of Hitler than Catholics, and no Catholic leader of any importance ever gave himself away. The Nazi assault on the Catholic tyranny of Dollfuss in Austria showed the underlying hatred of the Party for the Catholic Church and horrified Catholics throughout the world. (Dollfuss, a strange kind of dictator whom even his enemies respected, was denied a priest and allowed to bleed to death for hours by Nazi thugs.) In 1937, Pope Pius XI's condemnation of the Nazi regime, the encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge, was smuggled into Germany by a masterpiece of secret planning, placed in the hands of every priest in the country, and read on the same Sunday from every pulpit: the worst slap in the face that Hitler suffered until the War. Even if the Lutherans had wanted to do anything like this, they would not have been able to, because they did not have the supranational organization of the Catholic Church.