Catholic Church And Nazi Germany

Catholic Church And Nazi Germany

On can only imagine the measures taken to illicit this promise. . Bishop Wurm, like Pastor Braun, prepared a factual report and sent a strong protest to the Interior Minister, Frick, stating the impossibility of Christians condoning these measures(46).
The immediate historic background was significant in setting the tone of Galen’s protests.
Massive extermination of children, however, continued until the war’s end(30). Adolf Hitler never signed into law any measure allowing for “mercy killing. Speaking to this issue, Hitler stated in a 1944 address to officer cadets the following, summarizing the Nazi position: Nature is always teaching us…that she is governed by the principle of selection: that victory is to the strong and that the weak must go to the wall. Brandt tried to convince Bodelschwingh that the program was needed to save the nation, Bodelschwingh replied that no one had the right to be inhumane(40). Thus it was significant that Bishop Wurm spoke out not only for governmental non-interference in the church but also in defense of the “natural” right of the individual person – whether insane, handicapped, or Jewish, and thus was against the very heart of Nazi ideology and policy.

Nature does not see in weakness any extenuating reasons…on the contrary, weakness calls for condemnation(6). Galen and Faulhaber, involved as they were in open struggle using political methods to fight political-moral issues, were not part of a vast campaign. When word of the so-called “mercy deaths” reached the offices of the Catholic hierarchy, the outcry was particularly loud. Notes 48 through 64 are missing. Race is of the natural order; Christianity is a revealed religion and therefore of the supernatural order. It is of particular note that it was in fact the German churches who had for so long led the way in caring for the mentally ill in institutions that were international models of their kind. In America at present (1985) the converse is true: the executive branch of the government fights for the rights of the helpless who are suffering under the oppression of their fellow people, whose “rights” to oppress are protected by the courts.
The completed questionnaires were then to be directed to a team of four “experts” in Berlin, who classified each patient as a “+” or a “–”, that is worthy to be helped or not worthy to be helped. Early in 1941, heavy bombing raids leveled much of the city of Münster, giving the Nazi’s middle leadership a reason to seize church property under the pretext of needing more school and hospital space, but really doing so in order to “get even” with Bishop Galen. Between 1939 and 1945, over 300,000 people with varying degrees of mental and physical handicaps met their death by means of the Nazi “mercy death” programs. Afraid that the morale of the soldiers would be lessened in light of the possible fate of relatives, or even of themselves were they to return wounded, Hitler ordered in August of 1941 a change in the operation.

The director of the institution at Kückenmühle refused, as had Bodelschwingh, to cooperate, but suffered the total takeover of his institution by the state(44). Unfortunately, Braune was arrested in August of 1940 and kept for three months, being “freed on his promise not to undertake further actions against the measures of the state or party”(39).

The tried and tested extermination centers were set up in remote areas, particularly in Poland, to be used on Jews and prisoners of war.

Brandt are responsibly commissioned to extend the authority of physicians to be designated by name, so that a mercy death may be granted to patients who according to human judgment are incurably ill according to the most critical evaluation of the state of their disease. The writer of this paper would like to concentrate on this program in particular, as it seems to have more in common with the present day practices than does the Jewish Holocaust. From the outset, the program was the brainchild of the psychiatrists, who were merely given freedom by Hitler to pursue their plans. Although a part of the compromising Catholic hierarchy which had made easy peace with Hitler in the famous 1933 Concordat, von Faulhaber was able to see early on that the Nazis never intended to abide by the Concordat’s regulations.
His patients obviously were not spared.
Copies of his sermons were distributed far and wide at great risk to those who smuggled them out of the country and to the soldiers at the front lines.
He was, of course,threatened severely for interfering in top secret political matters, yet he succeeded in winning the sympathy of Justice Minister Gurtner(38).
Like Wurm and Braune, he did his homework. The ideology which produced the Euthanasia program and the ideology which motivated the response of the church leaders could not have been more diametrically opposed.
In Nazi Germany, the medical profession planned and implemented the Euthanasia program. Yet, his ultimate intentions were clear, as spoken a few months later: “I am quite sure that a man like Bishop von Galen knows full well that I shall extract retribution to the last farthing”(68). The concept of the sacred value of the individual had been replaced by the concept of the good of the state. For example, when Pastor Schlaich was requested to return his completed patient questionnaires, he did protest, not on moral or biblical grounds but on the grounds that there was no legal beyonce date of birth basis for the Euthanasia program(34).
Mercy death bills faced the legislators of several states.

The rightful place of God as the One who should choose life or death for each man on earth had been usurped by the psychiatric doctors of Nazi Germany. Here he laid the ground work for his public opposition to these programs based on racial theories which elevated nationalistic goals over revealed truth: What is the relation of henry ford imax theater Christianity to the German race?Race and Christianity are not mutually opposed but they do belong to different orders. Scheduled to be eliminated in the first round of the program were some structural foam plastic inc 70,000 schizophrenics, epileptics, and those with multiple sclerosis, polio, encephalitis, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s chorea, brain tumors, as well as the clinically insane(23).
In one letter he stated that even in wartime, one may not discard the everlasting foundation of the moral order, nor the fundamental rights of the individual(59). For, as Mother Gallin puts it “…untiring opposition and open condemnation of the Nazi program came from the pulpit of…Bishop Galen”(61).
As if these factors alone were not enough to seal the fate of the weak in German society, the development of the theory of German racial superiority would leave no doubts. In primitive societies, the community rids itself of its weaklings. Yet it was he who was the chief formulation of the compulsory sterilization law of 1933.
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It was the job of the SS race examiners, headed by Heinrich Himmler, to establish “an order of good blood to serve Germany”(12). , Publishers, New York, 1968), p.
The fact is that Hitler crazy hot layout myspace had free vista wallpaper window had ample reason and les symboles de la france ability to do just that on countless occasions, for Bishop Galen had proven himself a thorn in Hitler’s side in many scioto county probate court ways for a full ten years prior to the fall of Münster to the Americans.