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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Oct 12, 2018 9:07:24 GMT
Today is the 75th anniversary of the execution of Willi Graf,the last member of the White Rose to be Guillotined. Graf was a medical student and conscript in the Wehrmacht who with fellow students in Munich University, Hans and Sophie Scholl, Christoph Probst and Alexander Schmorrell and academic Dr Kurt Huber paid the ultimate price for their resistance to the Third Reich. All did so from religious convictions. I thought this a good time and place to start a new thread on the topic.
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Post by assisi on Oct 12, 2018 14:26:32 GMT
This excerpt from an article in 2004 by James Molyneux, now dead but formerly head of the Ulster Unionist Party, is shocking and sad, particularly in reference to the Mass scene:
I witnessed the dead of Belsen: we must always confront tyranny By James Molyneaux12:01AM GMT 27 Jan 2004
My first encounter with Belsen was the sight of dead bodies hanging from the electric fences. These victims had thrown themselves on the fences to end their own unimaginable suffering. The camp authorities had left them where they died. It was May 1945. The Allied and Russian armies were battling to link up in central Germany; Field Marshal Montgomery led his 21st Army Group to Lüneburg, with our RAF Regiment Wing in close support.
On arrival at Tactical Headquarters, we had been briefed on the discovery of the Belsen prison camp nearby. In company with our RAF medical unit and the two 2nd Army Field hospitals, we wasted no time. Briefed though we were, the shock excelled all the horrors of the battles of the 12 months since Normandy.
As we passed through the camp gates, the Royal Military Police requested us to drive very slowly to avoid the numerous disoriented prisoners. We were handed adhesive tape to put over the vehicle horns in order to prevent them going off accidentally, lest the shock would cause still more deaths.
The British liberators were staggered and shocked by the inhuman behaviour of some of the former guards, who continued to abuse and torment prisoners nearing death when they assumed we were looking the other way. I confess that on such occasions I may have breached the Geneva Convention to prevent further ill treatment of helpless victims. Their behaviour after we had arrived contradicted the excuse that the SS had forced them to carry out orders. Our new orders to them were "Stop acting like savages".
The most moving experience came on the second morning as I was walking from what had been the luxury SS barracks which our troops had transformed into a hospital. My attention was drawn to two packing cases covered by a worn red curtain. A young Polish priest was clinging to this makeshift altar with one hand, while celebrating Mass. Between his feet lay the body of another priest who probably died during the night. No one had had the energy to move the body.
I had no difficulty in following the old Latin Mass, having been educated at St James's Roman Catholic School in County Antrim, and, although an Anglican, I had gained a working knowledge of all the rituals. Still supporting himself against the altar, the young priest did his best to distribute the consecrated elements. Some recipients were able to stumble over the rough, scrubby heathland. Others crawled forward to receive the tokens and then crawled back to share them with others unable to move. Some almost certainly passed on to another - probably better - world before sunset. Whatever one's race or religion one can only be uplifted and impressed by that truly remarkable proof of the ultimate triumph of good over evil.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 13, 2018 21:42:10 GMT
Dietrich von Hildebrand's MY STRUGGLE AGAINST HITLER is quite useful. He was certainly extremely courageous and he recognised the demonic nature of Nazism very early. It might be noted, however, that his own politics were pretty right-wing (he believed in a corporate state on the model of the Dollfuss regime in Austria). Some links relating to the anti-Nazi journalist and Catholic convert Fritz Gerlich, who was beaten to death in Dachau in 1934. The Youtube videos are in German without subtitles. Note that his portrayal in the film HITLER: THE RISE OF EVIL downplays the religious element in his anti-Nazism. In MY BROTHER THE POPE Georg Ratzinger states their parents read Gerlich's paper THE STRAIGHT WAY (DER GERADE WEG) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Gerlichwww.youtube.com/watch?v=27YxQ0toyjUwww.youtube.com/watch?v=V6WyBOyZ6vwRon Rosenbaum's 1998 book EXPLAINING HITLER includes a chapter on Gerlich, including his controversial association with the alleged stigmatist Therese Neumann. Thomas Weber's BECOMING HITLER; THE MAKING OF A NAZI (2017) has some references to Gerlich's early contact with Hitler in Munich,including Gerlich's asking at a press conference during the Beer Hall Putsch why stormtroopers were beating up Jews. (Gerlich was a consistent opponent of anti-semitism who saw Jews as fellow-citizens. It is an abiding shame that so few professed Christians took the same view.)
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Post by Young Ireland on Oct 14, 2018 19:02:20 GMT
Not sure if anyone has heard of a priest named Franz Reinisch, about whom a book was published quite recently. He was put under intense pressure not to resist conscription into the Wehrmacht, even from within his own order, yet persevered to the end. He was also an early member of the Schoenstatt movement by the way: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Reinisch
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Oct 16, 2018 7:58:19 GMT
I would like to reflect that Nazi persecution of Christianity is a given and it is clear the Church has survived. I would like to talk about those who organised against Nazism.
In my recollection there are two canonised saints, Maximilian Kolbe and Edith Stein, among the martyrs and confessors of the period. There are a lot more beati: Titus Brandsma O. Carm, Rupert Meyer SJ, Cardinal von Galen, Franz Jaeggerstetter, Father Georg Hafner, Nikolaus Groß, about 100 Polish martyrs and others many of whom are totally unknown.
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Post by Account Deleted on Oct 16, 2018 10:33:19 GMT
If you do mean Christian (not exclusively Catholic) then mention must be made of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was martyred for his vocal opposition to Nazism and resistance to their attempts to unify German Protestant communities under one Pro-Nazi Protestant congregation. His book The Cost of Discipleship reflects an uncompromising, perhaps even fundamentalist, view of Christianity because of his experiences at the time, but can be theologically dubious in places.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Oct 16, 2018 12:36:02 GMT
Funny I think that one book that needs to be written is Hitler and the Protestant Churches. Nevertheless, there were many Protestant opponents of Hitler. Bonhoeffer collaborated with Rev Martin Niemoller in founding the Confessing Church which is about the most doctrinally orthodox Protestant denomination there is (and I count Anglicans as Protestants). The Scholls in the White Rose were Lutheran (their mother had been a Lutheran nun prior to marrying their father). Plenty of Lutherans and Calvinists in Germany, Scandinavia, the Netherlands and elsewhere resisted Nazism. But the Protestant churches were poor. For example, Blessed Titus Brandsma drafted a letter condemning the racism of the Nazism which was meant to be a joint letter of the Dutch Catholic bishops and the elders of the Dutch Reformed Church (think of the precedent). The Calvinist leaders pulled out at the last minute and the bishops issued the letter unilaterally. This led to the arrest of 7000 Catholics of Jewish origin in the Netherlands including Edith Stein and her sister. Later, Father Brandsma was arrested. This made Pope Pius very wary of public opposition. But the Luxembourgeois priest in Dachau, Mgr Jean Bernard refers to the Protestant minister who frequently berated him about "his stupid Pope, shooting his mouth off again instead of learning to be silent". Draw your own conclusions.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Oct 16, 2018 12:40:22 GMT
There was also Orthodox resistance to Hitler. To return to the White Rose, Alexander Schmorrell was Russian Orthodox and has been canonised by the Russian Church Abroad as a new Russian martyr. I heard a story about a Greek Orthodox Bishop of one of the Greek Islands who was asked to compile a list of Jews on the island by the occupiers. He wrote his own name and left it at that. And they didn't pursue the matter.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Oct 16, 2018 12:43:34 GMT
Mentioning Martin Niemoller, he was a naval officer in the First World War and a very effective U-boat commander who held the Iron Cross. Blessed Rupert Meyer also received the Iron Cross as an army chaplain in the Great War. These people were patriots.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 16, 2018 19:41:12 GMT
To be fair to the Protestants, the German church situation was unusual. In the early nineteenth century a king of Prussia forced the Calvinist and Lutheran churches into a single body under tight state control (many American Lutherans are descendants of "Old Lutherans" who emigrated to escape this forced union) and with the king given the title of Presiding Bishop. (The king also tried to assert control over his Catholic subjects in the Rhineland, and imprisoned the Archbishop of Cologne for refusal to co-operate.) This meant that the Evangelical church was tightly tied to the Prusso-German monarchy and confused (to put it politely) by its fall, and inclined to assume deference to the state as a given. In the Netherlands, my understanding is that while the main Dutch Reformed Church did not read out from their pulpits the protest they had previously agreed with the Catholic Church, a smaller ultra-Calvinist denomination did so. (I am not sure whether the ten Boom family, who paid a terrible price for sheltering Jews, which they did from expressly Christian motives, were members of this smaller church or of the mainstream body). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrie_ten_BoomHere Rod Dreher comments on an attempt to prohibit California homeschoolers from using Corrie ten Boom's memoir THE HIDING PLACE to teach about the Holocaust on the grounds that it is "sectarian". www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/corrie-ten-boom-deported-again/comment-page-1/#commentsIncidentally, I have the impression - I think I read it somewhere - that Corrie ten Boom was quite anti-Catholic, but that doesn't detract from what she and her family did and suffered. Credit where credit is due.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 16, 2018 19:59:07 GMT
As regards the Orthodox, leading members of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church took a prominent role in the protests which led to the cancellation of the deportation of Jews from Old Bulgaria to the death camps (though Jews from newly annexed territories under Bulgarian control were deported and murdered). Angelo Roncalli (St. John XXIII) who had been Nuncio in Sofia before being transferred to Istanbul, also interceded with the Bulgarian king on behalf of the Jews. Here are brief Wikipedia entries for two Bulgarian Orthodox bishops declared Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem - that is, they risked their own lives to save Jews. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_I_of_Bulgariaen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyril_of_Bulgaria en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_of_the_Bulgarian_JewsWhen I visited Gladstone's Library in Wales some years ago, I was told that some Bulgarian Orthodox cited the denunciation by Gladstone of Turkish massacres of Bulgarian civilians in the 1870s as a precedent for speaking up on behalf of the Jews.
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 7, 2018 21:50:38 GMT
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Nov 8, 2018 8:44:58 GMT
Given that I am reading about the White Rose at present, there is a lot of deja vu here. Though Blessed Franz is all the more remarkable for his lack of formal education
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 12, 2018 23:03:52 GMT
The late Bishop Donal Lamont O.Carm was deeply influenced by his teacher in Rome, a German Carmelite (Fr John of the Cross Brenninkmyer) exiled for his opposition to Nazism, who reminded his students that some of them would probably be martyrs. Bishop Lamont cites Christian resistance to Nazism (he also mentions Bl. Titus Brandsma) in his SPEECH FROM THE DOCK defending his opposition to the Smith regime in Rhodesia. The material collected in the recent book on Bishop Lamont, A BISHOP COULD NOT DO OTHERWISE (Columba) is well worth reading.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 28, 2019 23:48:00 GMT
This US Orthodox blogger (in communion with the Moscow Patriarchate) is very pro-Russian and hostile to Eastern Rite Catholicism and Ukrainian nationalism (which he sees as "orientalist" in its identification of Ukraine as "western/civilised" and Russia as "eastern/barbaric"). That said, his post does give some impressive descriptions of Eastern Orthodox attempts to save Jews from Nazism, and he does acknowledge some bright spots in the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic record (as well as some heinous crimes, alas). Read with awareness of where it's coming from: heavyangloorthodox.blogspot.com/2019/02/jews-and-eastern-churches-in-wwii.html
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