The German War (43 page)

It was not that Galen and the other bishops lacked knowledge. In Berlin, Margarete Sommer ran an office for relief work under the auspices of Bishop Preysing, where she compiled and passed on information on what had happened to the Catholics of Jewish descent after they were deported to the Baltic territories. She also received confidential information from Hans Globke, a high official within the Interior Ministry. Briefed by Sommer, Bishop Berning of Osnabrück concluded, on 5 February 1942, that ‘There is clearly a plan to exterminate the Jews completely.’ This was a mere two weeks after Heydrich had held the top-secret Wannsee Conference in order to inform high-ranking administrators about the impending murder of 11 million European Jews. But it took Bishops Berning and Preysing another eighteen months before they pushed for a petition against the ‘deportation of non-Aryans in a manner that is scornful of all human rights’. In August 1943, the Fulda Bishops’ Conference rejected the proposal. In any case, it was too late: by this time, most of the Jews were dead. The most influential figure in German Catholicism, Cardinal Bertram, refused to be briefed any further by Margarete Sommer, insisting that he was only willing to receive written reports from her if they were countersigned by Preysing to guarantee their authenticity. Such a procedure, as the cardinal was well aware, would also have exposed both signatories to the Gestapo. If Bertram did not know what had happened to the Jews, it was because he made every effort not to know.
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One of the great ‘what ifs’ that historians continue to debate is whether concerted action by the churches could have stopped the murder of the Jews, in the way the public protests by Catholic bishops halted the killing of psychiatric patients in August 1941. Why they chose not to act in the case of the Jews has been the subject of considerable historical speculation and moral condemnation. But the comparison is flawed. The bishops did not protest against the murder of adult psychiatric patients when it was resumed in August 1942, even though they were well aware of it. This time, the Catholic bishops avoided making the information public. What mattered most to the bishops during the confrontation of 1941 was the Nazi attack on their institutions and, by the autumn, both sides had backed away from this contest. By the time of the Fulda Bishops’ Conference of August 1942, a clerical informer told the Gestapo that ‘there is general contentment with the Church’s successes in the year that has passed’, in particular with regard to the reduced tensions with the state and the end to seizure of Church property. Nor was it was only the Jews about whose fate the German Catholic bishops remained silent. They had set an ominous precedent for themselves when they chose not to speak up about the mass shootings in Poland in 1939. Those victims had included not only teachers, officers, Girl Guides and Jews, but Polish Catholic priests. Nazi ideologues may have regarded the Church as an international conspiracy, but the German clergy knew its national identity. After the Wehrmacht’s retreat from Moscow, the German Catholic Church was in no doubt about the seriousness of the war. In place of its contest with the Nazis for the spiritual leadership of the nation, it now found itself forging an uneasy, fractious alliance with the Party to rally all Germans to the urgent task of national defence.
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Left to their own devices, Catholics pulled in different directions. When the last, elderly Jews reported to the market square at Lemgo in the Lippe district of North Rhine–Westphalia in July 1942, their ‘Aryan’ neighbours looked on with disquiet. According to the local SD, a debate erupted over whether it was really necessary to deport old people to a camp, when they were already destined to ‘die out’. Spectators were split between churchgoers – some of whom even warned that the German people were inviting ‘divine punishment’ – and right-thinking National Socialists, who seem to have been in the minority in this case. Certainly, the SD conceded that even many ‘national comrades who have previously taken every appropriate and inappropriate opportunity to express their National Socialist convictions’ were advancing the humanitarian viewpoint now – perhaps because this last deportation affected objects of pity rather than fear. But Lemgo was an unusual case. In nearby Münster, where Bishop Galen had his seat, the final deportation went off without a hitch, with elderly Jews agreeing to pay the members of the SD to help carry their luggage. In Cologne, there was pressure from both laity and clerics to update the liturgy of the Catholic marriage service: they found the imprecation that the bride ‘be as long-lived and faithful as Sara’ to be ‘absurd’.
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As long as no institution in occupied Europe publicly condemned the deportation and murder of the Jews, discussion in Germany could largely be contained within limits set by the media. For a time – and in Germany during the Second World War, it only ever was temporary – the ‘spiral of silence’ worked. This was all the more remarkable because it is not clear that the same result could have been achieved if Goebbels had gone on preaching. Merely hinting at what most newspaper readers knew, the regime’s media managers found they had a better chance at shaping public opinion than through unrelenting propaganda. Moreover, Goebbels’s new approach avoided the risk of exposing the moral gulf between the murderous racial utilitarianism of National Socialism and a more pervasive Christian ethic in German society that shied away from outright murder. Achieving this balance depended in great measure on the silence of the churches, the institutions which, after the Nazi regime itself, had the greatest influence across Germany and occupied Europe.

Yet there was a steady stream of information which the Nazi regime was powerless to suppress. From June to December 1942, during the very months in which the genocide was at its height, the BBC reported on the deportation and murder of the Jews. On 17 December 1942, Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, addressed the House of Commons, describing the clearances of the Polish ghettos and the deportation of Jews from across the Continent ‘in conditions of appalling horror and brutality’. No philo-Semite, Eden chose his words carefully, stating that the German government was now ‘carrying out Hitler’s oft repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe’. He read out the condemnation of ‘this bestial policy of coldblooded extermination’ by the twelve Allied governments – Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, the United States, the UK, the USSR, Yugoslavia and the French National Committee – and their ‘solemn resolution to ensure that those responsible for these crimes shall not escape retribution’. At his close, the House stood in a minute’s silence. That week, the BBC German service broadcast several reports a day about the murder of the Jews.
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Three days before Eden’s statement, Goebbels had anticipated the Allied response with a degree of nonchalance, telling his ministerial conference: ‘We cannot reply to these matters . . . We are not in a position to get into a controversy over this, at least not in the world’s media.’ With an eye on media reporting in the neutral countries as well as on the home front, Goebbels called for a diversion, a German press campaign stressing Allied atrocities in India, Iran and other parts of the world. He met with a relatively weak response. The media lacked new material and German audiences were not sufficiently gripped by tales from the non-European and colonial world. German propaganda was not a complete failure, however. Its claim that the Allies were only fighting the war on behalf of the Jews hit a sensitive nerve in Britain. When Dr Cyril Garbett, the Archbishop of York, went so far as to issue a New Year’s Day message calling for a ‘crusade’ to save the Jews, it served to underline the claim. Even in Britain, the government wanted to avoid the charge of being in hock to the Jews, and reporting on the murder of the Jews was scaled down. From now on, Allied reporting about the genocide would be carefully embedded in reports of German atrocities against other groups, so that the Allied cause remained unmistakably that of humanity as a whole. Karl Dürkefälden was not unusual in listening to the BBC for news, but not many of his fellow countrymen were prepared to take their moral bearings from enemy radio.
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By late 1942, there were many sources to corroborate the Europe-wide murder of the Jews. There had been hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of witnesses to the shooting of Jews in the occupied Soviet territories, Baltic states and eastern Poland. Even the names of the death camps in occupied Poland – Chełmno, Beł
ec, Sobibor and Treblinka – as well as the new camp at Auschwitz in Upper Silesia began to be known. But information about what exactly happened in these places remained sketchy.

In Pomerania and in parts of occupied Poland and the Soviet Union, mobile gas vans were a common sight as they drove along country roads, pumping carbon-monoxide-laden exhaust fumes into their rear compartment. In Pomerania, they had been used in 1939–40 to kill psychiatric patients. From January 1942, they were used at Chełmno to murder the Jews from Łód
. In this case, considerable effort went into preserving secrecy. The old castle building which served as the camp was surrounded by a high wooden fence guarded by sentries, and military police cordoned off the roads into the area of forest where the bodies of those killed in the gassing vans were buried. The squads of Jews tasked with this work were routinely executed in their turn. Few visitors gained entry to the static gassing facilities installed at Beł
ec, Sobibor and Treblinka. One of those who did leave a record was an SS officer and disinfection expert, Kurt Gerstein, who visited Beł
ec on 20 August 1942. There he witnessed the arrival and gassing of a transport of Jews from Lwów. The diesel engine would not start and the Jews were kept locked in the gas chambers for two and a half hours while it was repaired. The gassing itself took a further thirty-two minutes. Gerstein’s task was to advise on how to disinfect the clothing and he was accompanied to Beł
ec by a part-time SS consultant, the Professor of Hygiene at the University of Marburg, Dr Wilhelm Pfannenstiel. The professor was fascinated by what was taking place and stood by the door with his eye glued to the glass peephole until it misted over. He commented that the wailing of the naked Jews crammed inside sounded ‘like in a synagogue’. The two men went to view the much bigger facility at Treblinka the next day, where Pfannenstiel complimented their hosts in an after-dinner speech on ‘the greatness of the work’ they were doing.
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