One of the tributaries that flowed into the river of Nazi antisemitism – a pastoral letter by a senior German Polish cardinal read out in every Catholic church in the country in 1936 included this assertion:
It is a fact that the Jews are fighting against the Catholic Church, persisting in free-thinking, and are the vanguard of godlessness, Bolshevism and subversion. It is a fact that the Jewish influence on morality is pernicious and that their publishing houses disseminate pornography. It is a fact that Jews deceive, levy interest, and are pimps. It is a fact that the religious and ethical influence of the Jewish young people on Polish young people is a negative one.
Other than that…
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20 responses to “It is a fact”
Hi Ophelia,
Is there a source for this? It seems odd that it is apparently written by a German cardinal for a German audience but contains “… influence of the Jewish young people on Polish young people…” making it sound less German and more Polish.
If it is accurate, I’ll keep a link to it for my “the NAZIs were atheists” rebuttal pile.
Persisting in freethinking? Those bastards!
And of course, Christians weren’t charging interest on loans, no, of course not. Wtf?
Hi David
I found a lot of sources by googling “It is a fact that the Jews are fighting against the Catholic Church, persisting in free-thinking” – with the quotation marks. That’s a translation of course, but googling turns up a lot of citations of it. It was a pastoral letter, so it’s probably not too difficult to find the German original on an official church site.
I gathered from reading some of the articles that cited it that the whole letter would explain why he was talking about Polish young people. I suspect something like Trump talking about Mexicans.
Regardless of the source of that quote, it’s a fact that the Christian Church has a long history of anti-Semitism, the Nazis used existing traditions to their advantage. Since Poland is an overwhelmingly Catholic country and before the Holocaust it had a large Jewish population it’s not surprising that the cardinal was concerned about ‘subversion’.
After WW2, some Catholic clergy organised the notorious ‘rat lines’, a network that aided the escape of Nazi war criminals.
It seems to be this and if so, what Ophelia found has been distorted. It’s definitely anti-Jewish, and supports boycotting them but is explicit in warning against violence. At the end there’s something about the blood that will be spilled being Polish, but the passage at the end of her extract says that Jewish youth in the schools have a detrimental effect on Catholic youth. I cannot give any guarantees regarding the source, but it’s not just a blogger or someone anonymous.
https://www.herder-institut.de/no_cache/bestaende-digitale-angebote/e-publikationen/dokumente-und-materialien/themenmodule/quelle/866/details.html
Oh yes? I didn’t know that. Sounds worth investigating…
Here’s a reasonable source in English that quotes at length:
https://books.google.de/books?id=jAoHKtQoCzoC&pg=PA92&dq=%22on+catholic+moral+principles%22+hlond+1936&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj-h_HIrbDOAhULGBQKHeKwCwEQ6AEIIjAB#v=onepage&q=%22on%20catholic%20moral%20principles%22%20hlond%201936&f=false
And one more for comparison:
https://books.google.de/books?id=SHl7CwAAQBAJ&pg=PA372&dq=%22on+catholic+moral+principles%22+hlond+1936&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj-h_HIrbDOAhULGBQKHeKwCwEQ6AEILjAD#v=onepage&q=%22on%20catholic%20moral%20principles%22%20hlond%201936&f=false
Thank you Stewart.
You’re welcome. Pays to get these things right :)
It is also a fact that the SS wore belt buckles with the words “GOTT MIT UNS” on them. (“God (is) with us”).
Wasn’t it the whole Wehrmacht?
There is much that is not absolutely black and white about the Nazi attitude to religion, partly because the party was headed by opportunists and also because there were individuals at or near the top who did not share the same views. It is possible to say unequivocally that there was never an official party line that espoused godlessness and both atheism and freethinking were violently attacked across the board. The majority of people who casually trash Nazis as atheists do so because they find it easy to call anyone an atheist who doesn’t believe in the same brand of Christianity as they do.
Reading that second passage of Stewart’s (the first one didn’t load right for some reason), it’s pretty clear that this was very much a Trump-esque hair-split: “Okay, you shouldn’t actually beat them up or burn down their shops, but let’s just all avoid them and try to drive them out of business by refusing to shop there, m’kay?”
And of course, those who would use the ‘condemned actual violence’ bit as a defense of the Church ignore the fact that a population isolated by a majoritarian boycott becomes very susceptible to violence–the Church made it acceptable to just ignore what the Nazis were doing to the Jews. “All that’s needed for evil to win,” etc.
Gott mit Uns was on most German service buckles. Army, SS, police, certainly. I don’t know about the Luftwaffe or the Navy.
Pius X declared the Catholic Church to be locked in permanent combat against science and democracy. And there I go with an unsupported allusion to toss onto the heap… I think I saw it in something by Gary Wills.
This is indeed Polish rather than German. It is from a pastoral letter issued by Cardinal Hlond, then Primate of Poland, in 1936.
See the wiki page on Hlond for more (including a cite to the Polish original): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Hlond#Relations_with_Jews
Oh, christ, what an idiot I am. Of course it is. I transposed it in my head between seeing it and posting about it.
A THOUSAND APOLOGIES.
Highly legitimate source. Herder-Institut is part of the Leibnitz Association; see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz_Association
I’m not seriously arguing against that in this case, but the irony needs to be mentioned, citing Wikipedia as evidence another institution is trustworthy…