Customer Reviews

HITLER'S PRIESTS: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism

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This isn't just another angry book like the ones that vilify Pius XII for his "silence", but rather a calm, fair and scholarly examination of the relationship between the Catholic clergy and the National Socialists.

It certainly isn't "deeply disturbing" (to use the Washington Post reviewer's cliché), but it makes one pause and wonder whether such things happen today. And indeed they do in a minor way, for many a priest still convinces himself that some fashionable ideology or other is just as important as his sacerdotal duties. Jesus may have said, "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's," but as this book demonstrates, the currents of the times can make it hard for the individual to distinguish what belongs to Caesar and what to God.

Many of these "brown priests", as they were known, saw no contradiction between their devotion to God and their devotion to Hitler, and according to the author, were puzzled that their fellow priests were either indifferent or hostile to National Socialist ideology.

The stories of quite a number of individuals are woven into the narration, and perhaps the most interesting and complex of them is Abbot Albanus Schachleiter (1861 - 1937), who, to the end of his days, continued to regard himself as both a pious Catholic and as a devoted supporter of National Socialism, including its virulent anti-Semitism. He felt a genuine spiritual distress when his bishop temporarily withdrew his priestly faculties and denied him Holy Communion.

This contrasts with a man like Josef Roth, who abandoned the priesthood, joined the Nazi bureaucracy, and vehemently attacked his former Church as effeminate and Jewish. To him, Christian good works were a weakness, and his Christ was a "heroic strongman". One can't help thinking of present-day dissidents who also reinvent Jesus in their own image.

Roth's death in a boating incident in 1941 may have been suicide.

The book also gives some idea of how difficult it was for bishops to deal with recalcitrant priests, and perhaps it can engender in the reader some sympathy for the plight of bishops in our own time who find themselves confronted with priests who thumb their noses at orthodoxy and lead their parishioners into heresy.

At the end of the book is an outline of the careers of the 138 men the author was able to identify positively as "brown priests". A glance through these reveals the variety of paths taken: many left the priesthood, and even the Church, and some were killed or just disappeared. Others however, after the process of "denazification", went on with parish life.

This is an excellent book on a subject previously little explored. I recommend it.

Well-researched and disturbing book that raises troubling questions about Catholic clergy's complicity in the Holocaust far beyond Pope Pius XII's infamous silence.