A mindset freed from bothering with reality

Rabbi David Gil Dalin is a Conservative rabbi, and author and co-author of several books on Jewish history. He is currently a professor of history and political science at Ave Maria University, and was previously associate professor of American Jewish history at the University of Hartford.

Dalin received a bachelor's degree from the University of California, Berkeley, a master's and doctorate from Brandeis University, and his Rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

He has recently published The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis.

I grew up with the picture Rolf Hochhut's (gentile, religious affiliation unknown to me) play "Der Stellvertreter" (The Deputy/Representative, 1963) painted, namely that of a cold cynic and a conniving politician who thinks that Communism is a far bigger threat to the Catholic Church than the Nazis. I would say that this picture is still the prevailing one in Germany, a country, which has never gotten over the Kulturkampf, the bitter struggle on the part of the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck to submit the Roman Catholic church to state control, which spanned much of the 1870's and 1880's. This "hot family feud" within German society dominated the formative period of the German party system and had a long-term impact on Germany's political culture well into the twentieth century and, as far as I can see, it is still very much alive and kicking.

Hochhuth's next play, "Soldiers, Necrology on Geneva" (1967) showed the Allied bombing campaigns as war crimes and Winston Churchill as a war criminal. The play was largely based on the work of the young historian David Irving. Since that time, Irving and Hochhuth have been close friends and in 2005 Hochhuth hit the headlines by defending his friend against being a holocaust denier, calling the allegation "simply idiotic" and Irving "an honourable man" in an interview with the "Junge Freiheit" (issue 08/05, February 18, 2005), the mouthpiece of the youth organisation of the NPD, the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands. He later expressed a lukewarm apology, saying that he didn't know that his friend of many decades was just that.

So much for the antisemitic statement that only Jews are adverse to Pius XII, whereas the rest of the world would gladly embrace his sainthood. ("Jews Veto Sainthood for Pius XII"). Or even ALL Jews. Or even a majority of Jews.

One of Pius' shrillest critics, John Cornwell (Roman Catholic) informed us in his self-explainingly titled book "Hitler's Pope" that Pius XII was a willing collaborator with the Nazi policy. To do him justice, Cornwell has recently renounced (in his recent book "The Pontiff in Winter", a critical evaluation of the papacy of John Paul II) his hypothesis, a significant event of which, even more significantly, the media, have taken little note.

Significant is, too, that Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's shattering condemnation of Pius XII, "A Moral Reckoning: The Catholic Church during the Holocaust and Today", received widespread and altogether favourable attention, different from his controversial book "Hitler's Willing Executioners", which was, sometimes fairly but generally unfairly, torn to shreds by the media and his colleagues.

Go figure!

(Please note that Goldhagen's scholarship in his criticism of Pius XII was severely criticised by, among others, such a renowned historian of Germany as Columbia University’s Fritz Stern, a Jew.)

Just because it's the truth

In the Sixties, a so far unknown West German writer named Rolf Hochhuth came to fame with the play "Der Stellvertreter. Ein christliches Trauerspiel" (The Deputy, a Christian Tragedy). It stated that Pius XII had supported Nazi Germany and encouraged Hitler to go ahead with the Holocaust of the Jews of Europe. Since then, Pius XII WAS the man who supported the German Holocaust of the Jews and, somewhat predictably, it didn't make much headlines when it transpired that Hochhuth had been employed by the KGB. I have covered the very topic here and here already. Now I've noticed with great pleasure that Lawrence Auster posted this at VFR:

Setting the record straight on the maligned Pius XII

Much of the Jewish community has tarnished itself in recent years by its support for the demonization of Pope Pius XII by such writers as John Cornwell, author of Hitler's Pope. Gary Krupp writing in the New York Post sets the record straight on the man he calls the friend of the Jews.

Friend to the Jews
By GARY L. KRUPP
December 28, 2009

A recent papal decree moved Pope Pius XII, among others, closer to sainthood--returning to the forefront the controversy over his role in World War II and the Holocaust.

Growing up Jewish in Queens, I never dreamt I would be defending the man I once believed to be a Nazi sympathizer and an anti-Semite. But my work since 2002 with my wife, Meredith, and the Pave the Way Foundation has led me to this point.

We founded Pave the Way to identify and eliminate nontheological obstacles between religions. Thus, despite our early prejudices, we decided to investigate the papacy of Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli), one of today's greatest sources of hurt between Jews and Catholics.

After years of research in documentary evidence and eyewitness testimony, what we found shocked us. We found nothing but praise and positive news articles concerning Pius' actions from every Jewish, Israeli and political leader of the era who lived through the war.

A few articles in the postwar era suggested that he should have done more to confront the Nazis--but it wasn't until 1963, in the wake of the fictitious play "The Deputy" (written five years after Pius died), that accusations began flowing that he had failed to act, that he was a cold-hearted Nazi sympathizer who couldn't care less about the Jewish people.

The evidence strongly suggests this was part of a KGB-directed and -financed bid to smear Pius, a Soviet disinformation campaign meant to discredit the Catholic Church, which at that time was profoundly anti-Communist.

In any case, the facts simply don't match what so many have come to believe about Pius.

It is unquestionable that Pius XII intervened to save countless Jews at a time most nations--even FDR's America--refused to accept these refugees. He issued false baptismal papers and obtained visas for them to emigrate as "Non Aryan Catholic-Jews." He smuggled Jews into the Americas and Asia. He ordered the lifting of cloister for men and women to enter monasteries, convents and churches to hide 7,000 Jews of Rome in a single day.

Among the 5,000 pages of documents that Pave the Way has located, there is abundant evidence that Pacelli was a lifelong friend of the Jews. Some highlights:

* In 1917, at the request of World Zionist Organization Director Nachum Sokolow, Nuncio Pacelli intervened with the Germans to protect the Jews of Palestine from extermination by the Ottoman Turks.

* In 1925, Pacelli arranged for Sokolow to meet with Pope Benedict XV to discuss a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

* In 1930, Pacelli supported the German bishops' orders excommunicating anyone who joined "the Hitler Party."

* In 1938, Pacelli intervened to defeat a Polish anti-koshering law.

* In 1939, A.W. Klieforth, the US consul general based in Cologne, Germany, wrote a confidential letter to Washington reporting on the "extremeness" of Pacelli's hatred of National Socialism and of Hitler.

* In 1947, at the United Nations, he encouraged the 17 Catholic countries out of the 33 in favor to vote for the partitioning of Palestine to create the State of Israel.

* A 1948 deposition by Gen. Karl Wolff, the SS commandant for Italy, revealed the Nazis' wartime plan to kidnap the pope, kill countless cardinals and seize the Vatican.

But the personal tales may be more compelling. Pacelli's childhood best friend was Guido Mendes, an Orthodox Jewish boy. He tells how Pacel- li shared Shabbat meals with him. Mendes taught him Hebrew, and Pacelli helped him to emigrate to Palestine in 1938.

Pius XII's detractors prefer to criticize rather than simply look at the evidence. Two years ago, Pope Benedict XVI ordered the opening of the Vatican's archives up to 1939, containing much evidence of Eugenio Pacelli's activities leading up to his papacy. According to the sign-in sheets, few of Pius' critics have bothered to come to the archives to view the material.

Pinchas Lapide, a Jewish historian, theologian and Israeli ambassador, stated that the actions and policies of Pius XII saved as many as 860,000 Jews.

Albert Einstein, Golda Meir, the chief rabbi of Palestine, the chief rabbi of Rome and the heads of every Jewish organization showered praise upon him during his lifetime.

Were all these witnesses who lived through the war misguided?

Gary L. Krupp is president of the Pave the Way Foundation, which has many of the documents noted here online at ptwf.org and which will soon publish a book with the main evidence in English, Hebrew, Spanish and French.

This is not about apologetics and it's certainly not history revision, at least not in the sense it is usually applied. It's simply the truth. Will people notice? I doubt it.

Here all entries that mention Pius XII can be found.

Who but a few Catholics and truth-loving people cares?

The Sage from Texas sent me the link to the following article, which appeared yesterday at NRO.

Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc, adds a totally new dimension to the smear campaign against Pius XII. Frightening stuff!

Moscow’s Assault on the Vatican
The KGB made corrupting the Church a priority.

[...]
In my other life, when I was at the center of Moscow’s foreign-intelligence wars, I myself was caught up in a deliberate Kremlin effort to smear the Vatican, by portraying Pope Pius XII as a coldhearted Nazi sympathizer. Ultimately, the operation did not cause any lasting damage, but it left a residual bad taste that is hard to rinse away. The story has never before been told.

BATTLING THE CHURCH
In February 1960, Nikita Khrushchev approved a super-secret plan for destroying the Vatican’s moral authority in Western Europe. The idea was the brainchild of KGB chairman Aleksandr Shelepin and Aleksey Kirichenko, the Soviet Politburo member responsible for international policies. Up until that time, the KGB had fought its “mortal enemy” in Eastern Europe, where the Holy See had been crudely attacked as a cesspool of espionage in the pay of American imperialism, and its representatives had been summarily jailed as spies. Now Moscow wanted the Vatican discredited by its own priests, on its home territory, as a bastion of Nazism.

Eugenio Pacelli, by then Pope Pius XII, was selected as the KGB’s main target, its incarnation of evil, because he had departed this world in 1958. “Dead men cannot defend themselves” was the KGB’s latest slogan. Moscow had just gotten a black eye for framing and imprisoning a living Vatican prelate, József Cardinal Mindszenty, the primate of Hungary, in 1948. During the 1956 Hungarian Revolution he had escaped from jail and found asylum in the U.S. Embassy in Budapest, where he began writing his memoirs. As the details of how he had been framed became known to Western journalists, he was widely seen as a saintly hero and martyr.

Because Pius XII had served as the papal nuncio in Munich and Berlin when the Nazis were beginning their bid for power, the KGB wanted to depict him as an anti-Semite who had encouraged Hitler’s Holocaust. The hitch was that the operation was not to give the least hint of Soviet bloc involvement. The whole dirty job had to be carried out by Western hands, using evidence from the Vatican itself...

...the KGB needed some original Vatican documents, even ones only remotely connected with Pius XII, which its dezinformatsiya experts could slightly modify and project in the “proper light” to prove the Pope’s “true colors.” The difficulty was that the KGB had no access to the Vatican archives, and that was where my DIE, the Romanian foreign intelligence service, came in. The new chief of the Soviet foreign intelligence service, General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, had created the DIE in 1949 and had until recently been our chief Soviet adviser; he knew that the DIE was in an excellent position to contact the Vatican and obtain approval to search its archives. In 1959, when I had been assigned to West Germany in the cover position as deputy chief of the Romanian Mission, I had conducted a “spy swap” under which two DIE officers (Colonel Gheorghe Horobet and Major Nicolae Ciuciulin), who had been caught red-handed in West Germany, had been exchanged for Roman Catholic bishop Augustin Pacha, who had been jailed by the KGB on a spurious charge of espionage and was finally returned to the Vatican via West Germany.

INFILTRATING THE VATICAN
“Seat-12” was the code name given to this operation against Pius XII, and I became its Romanian point man. To facilitate my job, Sakharovsky had authorized me to (falsely) inform the Vatican that Romania was ready to restore its broken relations with the Holy See, in exchange for access to its archives and a one-billion-dollar, interest-free loan for 25 years. (Romania’s relations with the Vatican had been severed in 1951, when Moscow accused the Vatican’s nunciatura in Romania of being an undercover CIA front and closed its offices. The nunciatura buildings in Bucharest had been turned over to the DIE, and now housed a foreign language school.) The access to the Papal archives, I was to tell the Vatican, was needed in order to find historical roots that would help the Romanian government publicly justify its change of heart toward the Holy See. The billion (no, that is not a typographical error), I was told, had been introduced into the game to make Romania’s alleged turnabout more plausible. “If there’s one thing those monks understand, it’s money,” Sakharovsky remarked.

My earlier involvement in the exchange of Bishop Pacha for the two DIE officers did indeed open doors for me. A month after receiving the KGB’s instructions, I had my first contact with a Vatican representative. For secrecy reasons that meeting — and most of the ones that followed — took place at a hotel in Geneva, Switzerland. There I was introduced to an “influential member of the diplomatic corps” who, I was told, had begun his career working in the Vatican archives. His name was Agostino Casaroli, and I would soon learn that he was truly influential. On the spot this monsignor gave me access to the Vatican archives, and soon three young DIE undercover officers posing as Romanian priests were digging around in the papal archives. Casaroli also agreed “in principle” to Bucharest’s demand for the interest free loan, but he said the Vatican wished to place certain conditions on it. (Up until 1978, when I left Romania for good, I was still negotiating for that loan, which had gone down to $200 million.)

During 1960-62, the DIE succeeded in pilfering hundreds of documents connected in any way with Pope Pius XII out of the Vatican Archives and the Apostolic Library. Everything was immediately sent to the KGB via special courier. In actual fact, no incriminating material against the pontiff ever turned up in all those secretly photographed documents. Mostly they were copies of personal letters and transcripts of meetings and speeches, all couched in the routine kind of diplomatic language one would expect to find. Nevertheless, the KGB kept asking for more documents. And we sent more.

THE KGB PRODUCES A PLAY
In 1963, General Ivan Agayants, the famous chief of the KGB’s disinformation department, landed in Bucharest to thank us for our help. He told us that “Seat-12” had materialized into a powerful play attacking Pope Pius XII, entitled The Deputy, an oblique reference to the pope as Christ’s representative on earth. Agayants took credit for the outline of the play, and he told us that it had voluminous appendices of background documents put together by his experts with help from the documents we had purloined from the Vatican. Agayants also told us that The Deputy’s producer, Erwin Piscator, was a devoted Communist who had a longstanding relationship with Moscow. In 1929 he had founded the Proletarian Theater in Berlin, then sought political asylum in the Soviet Union when Hitler came to power, and a few years later had “emigrated” to the United States. In 1962 Piscator had returned to West Berlin to produce The Deputy.
[...]
The Deputy saw the light in 1963 as the work of an unknown West German named Rolf Hochhuth, under the title Der Stellvertreter. Ein christliches Trauerspiel (The Deputy, a Christian Tragedy). Its central thesis was that Pius XII had supported Hitler and encouraged him to go ahead with the Jewish Holocaust. It immediately ignited a huge controversy around Pius XII, who was depicted as a cold, heartless man more concerned about Vatican properties than about the fate of Hitler’s victims. The original text presents an eight-hour play, backed by some 40 to 80 pages (depending on the edition) of what Hochhuth called “historical documentation.” In a newspaper article published in Germany in 1963, Hochhuth defends his portrayal of Pius XII, saying: “The facts are there — forty crowded pages of documentation in the appendix to my play.” In a radio interview given in New York in 1964, when The Deputy opened there, Hochhuth said, “I considered it necessary to add to the play a historical appendix, fifty to eighty pages (depending on the size of the print).” In the original edition, the appendix is entitled “Historische Streiflichter” (historical sidelights). The Deputy has been translated into some 20 languages, drastically cut and with the appendix usually omitted.

Before writing The Deputy, Hochhuth, who did not have a high school diploma (Abitur), was working in various inconspicuous capacities for the Bertelsmann publishing house. In interviews he claimed that in 1959 he took a leave of absence from his job and went to Rome, where he spent three months talking to people and then writing the first draft of the play, and where he posed “a series of questions” to one bishop whose name he refused to reveal. Hardly likely! At about that same time I used to visit the Vatican fairly regularly as an accredited messenger from a head of state, and I was never able to get any talkative bishop off into a corner with me — and it was not for lack of trying. The DIE illegal officers we infiltrated into the Vatican also encountered almost insurmountable difficulties in penetrating the Vatican secret archives, even though they had airtight cover as priests.

During my old days in the DIE, when I would ask my personnel chief, General Nicolae Ceausescu (the dictator’s brother), to give me a rundown of the file on some subordinate, he would always ask me, “For promotion or demotion?” During its first ten years of life, the Deputy leaned toward the Pope’s demotion. It generated a flurry of books and articles, some accusing and some defending the pontiff. Some went so far as to lay the blame for the Auschwitz atrocities on the pope’s shoulders, some meticulously tore Hochhuth’s arguments to shreds, but all contributed to the huge attention this rather stilted play received in its day. Today, many people who have never heard of The Deputy are sincerely convinced that Pius XII was a cold and evil man who hated the Jews and helped Hitler do away with them. As KGB chairman Yury Andropov, the unparalleled master of Soviet deception, used to tell me, people are more ready to believe smut than holiness.

FALSEHOODS UNDERMINED
Toward the mid 1970s, The Deputy started running out of steam. In 1974 Andropov conceded to us that, had we known then what we know today, we would never have gone after Pope Pius XII. What now made the difference was newly released information showing that Hitler, far from being friendly with Pius XII, had in fact been plotting against him.

Just a few days before Andropov’s admission, the former supreme commander of the German SS (Schutzstaffel) squadron in Italy during World War II, General Friedrich Otto Wolff, had been released from jail and confessed that in 1943 Hitler had ordered him to abduct Pope Pius XII from the Vatican. That order had been so hush-hush that it never turned up after the war in any Nazi archive. Nor had it come out at any of the many debriefings of Gestapo and SS officers conducted by the victorious Allies. In his confession Wolff claimed that he had replied to Hitler that his order would take six weeks to carry out. Hitler, who blamed the pope for the overthrow of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, wanted it done immediately. Eventually Wolff persuaded Hitler that there would be a great negative response if the plan were implemented, and the Führer dropped it.
[...]
A few years later, Pope John Paul II started the process of sanctifying Pius XII, and witnesses from all over the world have compellingly proved that Pius XII was an enemy, not a friend, of Hitler. Israel Zoller, the chief rabbi of Rome between 1943-44, when Hitler took over that city, devoted an entire chapter of his memoirs to praising the leadership of Pius XII. “The Holy Father sent by hand a letter to the bishops instructing them to lift the enclosure from convents and monasteries, so that they could become refuges for the Jews. I know of one convent where the Sisters slept in the basement, giving up their beds to Jewish refugees.” On July 25, 1944, Zoller was received by Pope Pius XII. Notes taken by Vatican secretary of state Giovanni Battista Montini (who would become Pope Paul VI) show that Rabbi Zoller thanked the Holy Father for all he had done to save the Jewish community of Rome — and his thanks were transmitted over the radio. On February 13, 1945, Rabbi Zoller was baptized by Rome’s auxiliary bishop Luigi Traglia in the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli. In gratitude to Pius XII, Zoller took the Christian name of Eugenio (the pope’s name). A year later Zoller’s wife and daughter were also baptized.

David G. Dalin, in The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews From the Nazis, published a few months ago, has compiled further overwhelming proof of Eugenio Pacelli’s friendship for the Jews beginning long before he became pope. At the start of World War II, Pope Pius XII’s first encyclical was so anti-Hitler that the Royal Air Force and the French air force dropped 88,000 copies of it over Germany.

Over the past 16 years, the freedom of religion has been restored in Russia, and a new generation has been struggling to develop a new national identity. We can only hope that President Vladimir Putin will see fit to open the KGB archives and set forth on the table, for all to see, how the Communists maligned one of the most important popes of the last century.

My take on that? Fat chance!

However, Pacepa is saying that ultimately, the operation to smear Pius XII's reputation did not cause any lasting damage. How's that if everybody from toddler to grandma in Germany, granted they have ever heard of Pius' existence, is convinced that he was a "Nazi"? I tested it.

What about the dramatic loss of Christian spirituality and authority in the Western world? Not just of the Catholic church, but of Christianity generally? What about mass defection to tin gods like Scientology, Wicca, Shamanism, animal rights or "Green" causes, the new Ersatz-religion? What about the vilest of all those symptoms, the ever-growing number of Muslim converts? Now, Pius XII's reputation seems to be fairly restored -- frankly, who but a few Catholics and decent, truth-loving people cares?

Neither Woe, Grandeur, Nor Lust, Nor Fear -- The Lion of Münster

Laß höchster Gott / mich doch nicht auff dem Lauffplatz gleiten /
Laß mich nicht Ach nicht Pracht / nicht Lust nicht Angst verleiten!
Dein ewig-heller Glantz sey vor und neben mir /
Laß / wenn der müde Leib entschläfft / die Seele wachen
Und wenn der letzte Tag wird mit mir Abend machen
So reiß mich aus dem Thal der Finsternüß zu dir.
Aus: Abend

Let Highest God / me but not stumble on my pathway /
Let neither woe, grandeur / nor lust nor fear mislead me!
Your everlasting shine may guide and be beside me /
Let / once the tired corpse will sleep / the spirit stay awake
And when the final day will make its night for me
Then tear me from the vale of darkness home to you.
From: Night

Andreas Gryphius (1616-1664)
(Translation mine)

Count Clemens August Galen was the Bishop of Münster, the political and ecclesiastical capital of the strongly Catholic region of Westphalia from September 2, 1933 until March 22, 1946. He took an inordinately courageous stand against the Nazi policies, undaunted by the imminent danger to his own freedom and life.

His immense prestige at home and abroad and the staunch backing by the people of Westphalia was what ultimately saved him from the extermination other bishops, and many of his own priests, suffered. At the end of the day, not even the Nazis dared to touch the tall and powerful scion of one of the oldest noble families of the deeply Catholic Münsterland. In the end, the "simple pastor", who had been by far not the first choice of the Holy See as Bishop of Münster, had won the boundless reverence of his flock, an uncommon occurrence among the somewhat dour Westphalians, and, finally, the world.

Burg (Castle) Dinklage, Galen's birthplace

Clemens von Galen (he only took August as a second name when he became bishop) was born in 1878 at Burg Dinklage, seat of the family for centuries, in the Oldenburg part of the Münsterland. He was the eleventh of the thirteen children of Graf Ferdinand Heribert Galen (1831-1906), a notable member of the Catholic Zentrum party and his wife Elisabeth, née Countess von Spee. Graf Ferdinand Galen, then a member of the Deutscher Reichstag had in 1877 not just famously spoken about the importance of a social conscience and demanded a Christian-social order, but lived by it -- notably ridiculed by August Bebel.

A Long Tradition of Loyalty and Service

The Galen family looked back to a long tradition of deep loyalty and service to the Catholic Church and the family had indeed put forth many priests and bishops before.


Christoph Bernhard von Galen, "Bomben Bernd", (1606 -1678), Prince Bishop of Münster

An important part of the spiritual and political family heritage was a lively rememberance of the Prussian Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church in the 19th century, in which a relative, the Arch-Bishop of Cologne, Clemens August Droste zu Vischering, had played an important part. Droste-Vischering had been imprisoned by the Prussian authorities from 1837-1839 with the, for Prussia, unexpected and unwelcome result of a re-enforced political Catholicism.

Count Clemens' great-uncle was Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler, Bishop of Mainz, the most eminent Bishop of the 19th century, who had been known as the "workers' bishop" for his indefatigable efforts for the oppressed and exploited unskilled German workers in their struggle to form trade unions to be able to fairly bargain for better wages and decent working conditions.

Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler, Bishop of Mainz (1811-1877), "workers' bishop", Count Clemens' great-uncle

Following studies at the seminaries of Innsbruck (Tyrol) and Münster, Count Clemens was ordained to the priesthood in Münster cathedral in 1904 where, thirty years later, he would become the staunch spiritual and moral backbone of Catholic Germany.

He first served as chaplain to his uncle suffragan bishop Maximilian Gereon Graf Galen at Münster, then for 23 years as a big-city-pastor in the "diaspora" in Berlin, where he soon became known for his sense of duty, kindness and accessibility to the members of his congregation at all times.

Newly ordained priest Count Clemens within the circle of his family.

Dr. Carl Sonnenschein, Catholic priest, social reformer and head of an interreligious philantropic circle in Berlin judged him scathingly as being "entirely 13th century" because of his unfaltering opposition to any "modernisation" or revaluation of the Catholic church. 1929, Galen was appointed parish priest of the Town- and Market Church of St. Lambert, Stadt- und Marktkirche St. Lamberti zu Münster, the capital of his native Westphalia.

In January 1933 Hitler became chancellor of Germany. In February the Nazis took over the key positions in government and began to dominate all of Germany. On February 28, after the burning of the Reichstag, Hitler, persuaded Reichspräsident von Hindenburg to issue a decree effectively scrapping the basic citizen rights, which led to the passage of the Enabling Bill, the so-called Ermächtigungsgesetz, which de facto abolished the parliaments and gave the cabinet total legislative power.

On March 23, 1933 Hitler made a statement in which he promised to work for peaceful relations between Church and State. Five days later, the German bishops in a joint statement said that, though they maintained a negative attitude to Nazism in the past, in view of the public guarantee of Hitler to respect Catholic doctrine and the rights of the Church, they now believed that the previous general warnings and bans were no longer necessary, a step which paved the way for the signing of concordat between Nazi Germany and the Vatican, with the expectation of improved conditions for the Church. It was ratified on September 10, 1933.

On September 2 of this fateful year, Clemens Galen was appointed bishop of Münster. Nec Laudibus, Nec Timore, unconcerned about praise, undaunted by fear, became his eccesiastical motto, which already pointed towards the manner in which he would exercise his ministry in the midst of the 20th century's most cruel dictatorship.

Too Overbearing An Attitude for A Simple Pastor

It is worth noting that Pastor Count Clemens hadn't been the Holy See's first choice for Bishop of Münster. When the election of Pastor Count Galen became known in September 1933, it triggered a number of startled reactions. "The Holy Spirit will have to help a lot" was the majority's scathing reaction of those who had known the minister of St. Lambert as a passionate and well-liked pastor. However, apart from his noble birth and towering figure of 6'8", he had never appeared to be particularly notable, either as an independent theological thinker, a preacher, or a writer. His only published work was a small book through which he had expressed, in 1932, his disgust at the secularisation of public life by the progress of Liberal and Socialist ideas. Even the title of this literary attack "Die 'Pest des Laizismus' und ihre Erscheinungsformen" ("The 'Plague of Laicism' and its Manifestations", published by the renowned publishing house Aschendorff, Münster), made it obvious where the writer stood regarding any revaluation of the church.

In fact, Nuntius Cesare Orsenigo had written to then Cardinal State Secretary Eugenio Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII, about "overbearing attitude, stubbornness and too schoolmasterly a manner for a simple pastor." But, and this is not without irony, while in the Germany of 1933, Galen's conservative leanings seemed at first glance to be in line with the new powers, this turned out to be a superficial and grossly misleading notion. However, at that time, it may have backed him in the election.

Bishop Galen's travels to administer the sacrament of confirmation to the youth of his diocese were a purpose- and powerful statement of Catholic self-assertion post 1933

One of the first things the finally elected bishop did was to spiritually strengthen his people, immediately establishing Perpetual Adoration of the Eucharist in a central church in his diocese and then enbarked on a campaign of ceaseless public challenges to the neo-pagan ideology of National Socialism, so that his people would not be swept away by the, no doubt, seductive appeal of nationalistic sentiment.

The bishop paid close attention to the literature of National Socialism, and in his first Lenten Pastoral already, in January 1934, he opposed the fundamental doctrine of the new politics, namely the veneration of the "race" as the Nazis understood it.

Hell Itself Is Let loose with Its Deceit

A few weeks later he wrote his Easter Pastoral. By now, he was much more certain of where National Socialism was leading -- to the systematic destruction of the Faith. Thus, he understood that it was absolutely necessary to address the matter head-on and to use all the authority and resources of the episcopal office to open people's minds to what was happening. The pastoral was read in a solemn manner, and was listened to by a crowded congregation in expectant silence. It didn't leave any doubt in its lucidity: "Hell itself is let loose with its deceit", the bishop warned, "which may even mislead good men". And: "With holy joy we will, should God permit them, like the martyrs endure abuse and persecution."

At the end of May 1935, Galen wrote to the Oberpräsident (governor) of Westphalia, protesting against a proposed rally in Münster where the chief Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg was scheduled to speak. In his Easter Pastoral, Galen had publicly denounced Rosenbergs infamous book 'Myth of the 20th Century' as "born-again-heathen heresy". "The overwhelming part of the Christian population of Westphalia", Galen said, "could regard the appearance of Rosenberg only as an outright provocation, designed to pour contempt on their holiest and most cherished religious convictions". On July 7, the massive rally was held in Münster's main square in front of the bishop's palace. Bishop Count Galen was reviled as a reactionary and as a leader of a political brand of Catholicism that refused to recognise that times had changed.

The next day, Catholic Münster retorted with a huge procession.

Galen spoke to the crowd and made it very clear that he would never yield to the enemies of Christianity and the persecutors of the Church.

One year later, when the day for the big Easter procession of 1936 arrived, the police, well aware of the huge crowd the bishop had drawn the previous year, roped off the cathedral square to prevent large numbers of people from assembling. The bishop went to the pulpit of the cathedral and thundered his protest: "Can the shepherd be severed from his flock? Can the police divide Catholics from their own bishop by ropes and chains?" (There were loud shouts of 'no!' from the crowd.) "They can't be divided... Sorrowful times, my dear people of Münster are at hand but I know that steadfastness will prevail".

The campaign of vilification of the clergy was intensified in the Nazi press. Readers were fed sensationalist charges of sexual immorality among priests and members of religious orders. "Immorality trials" were staged in courts and, by devious manipulation, were made to appear as an unbroken series of clerical offences.

"So it's not opportune to hurl ourselves now into a
struggle with the Churches.
The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural
death..."
Adolf Hitler, 14 October 1941.

Priests were pilloried as idlers and criminals and the bishop of Münster particularly targeted. Organised groups of thugs threw stones at the windows of his residence at night, singing obscene songs accompanied by the noise of breaking glass. The degree of observation imposed on Catholic bishops, both over their private lives and their high office, was unprecedented, even by Nazi standards, and got even worse during the war years. The Nazis gradually and effectively destroyed the independence of the Catholic press by a series of draconian laws. From April 1935, articles with a religious content were forbidden, in 1936 the publication of pastoral letters was altogether banned.

His Was A Simple Piety

What were the sources of the bishop's courage and vision during those years? We get some idea of this aspect of von Galen's life by a consideration of his personal piety. He had a deeply supernatural view of life, an attitude impressed on his mind from early childhood. The great truths of God's intervention in human history were constantly before his mind, reinforced by daily reading of the Scriptures. On the other hand, his was a simple piety which expressed itself in love for the Blessed Eucharist, in devotion to the Rosary, to relics and pilgrimages. He was very conscious of the effects of original sin, and consequently he not only went to confession frequently, but lived in a deep spirit of self-denial with regard to food and creature comforts. He did the Stations of the Cross every Friday afternoon. He renewed the consecration of his diocese to the Sacred Heart, a devotion which grew and matured deeply in his soul, especially during the war years.

He Called Them Thieves and Robbers to Their Faces

Time and again the bishop had argued with the authorities in Berlin because of the lawlessness of NSDAP and Gestapo and cited his lost honour as German man and bishop. That he thought it likely to be imprisoned at an early stage shows a document dating February 22, 1936, where the bishop ruled in detail what should happen in the case of, as he put it, "use of force" against himself, namely ringing of the mourning bells and after that total silence for the time of his "hold-up". The priests of his diocese appreciated the way their chief pastor stood up against the new heathenism, and how he supported them in their personal ordeals, when the Nazi campaign against his priests became increasingly vicious. Apart from those sent to the front, others were taken into 'protective custody', the disgusting euphemism used by the Gestapo for their actions, others were expelled from giving religious instruction, others again were sent to Dachau, the concentration camp near Munich, from which they were never to return. At Dachau had been established a "special block" for priests, where more than 2800 were imprisoned. Almost 500 from Germany and Austria, more than 1500 from Poland and about 150 priests from other countries, plus 60 Protestant pastors. From theology student to bishop, nobody was spared. The oldest priest captive was 82.

Bishop Count Galen in an undated photograph

Bishop Galen protested at every outrage committed against his priests and publicly exposed the crimes of the Gestapo with considerable risk to his own life. During the war years he maintained a copious correspondence with his priests at the front, who wrote to him about their experiences, the joys of their priestly work, or the burden of the Cross in their lives. They wrote to him as they would to a father, and he replied to every one of those letters personally. On the occasion of major feasts of the Church, he used to send them a circular letter to tell them about the joys and sorrows of their home diocese.

On Saturday 12 July, the Gestapo confiscated two Jesuit houses in Münster. As soon as the bishop heard about it, he went to the premises and caught the Gestapo in the act of driving the priests from their homes. He called them thieves and robbers to their faces. That night he wrote the sermon, which drew him to the attention of the world.

In this sermon he attacked the Nazis cadidly, without any thought of his own security. No German citizen, he said, had any defence against their power; they had replaced the courts and were above the law. He continued: "Not one of us is certain, though he be the most loyal, the most conscientious citizen, though he knows himself innocent, I say that not one of us is certain that he will not any day be dragged from his house and carried off to the cells of some concentration camp. I know full well that this may happen to me, perhaps now or on some future day. And it is because I shall then no longer be able to speak out publicly that I do so today. I openly warn them not to pursue these actions which I am firmly convinced will call down God's punishment and bring our people to misery and ruin".

"Christianity is an invention of sick brains."
Adolf Hitler, 13 December 1941.

He made it clear that because he was bound by his oath as bishop to uphold the moral order, he had to speak out publicly against the acts of the Gestapo and finished off with an uncompromising warning: "We demand Justice! If this plea is unheard and unheeded, if the rule of true justice is not brought back, our German nation will, notwithstanding the bravery of our soldiers and their splendid victories, collapse from internal corruption and uncleanness".

Bishop Galen was well aware that in saying what he said, he was not just going to be pilloried in the press, he knew he was playing with his life, but he was fully prepared to be martyred. Before delivering his famous sermons, he instructed his household to take a change of clothing to prison should he be arrested. Several times he was ready to speak up publicly for the Jews as well, but in the end he didn't because representatives of the Jewish community of Münster begged him not to because this might turn out as (according to their own, fatal, judgement) even more harmful to them.

Galen, together with his cousin the Bishop of Berlin Konrad Graf Preysing and the Archbishop of Freiburg, Conrad Gröber, a "hardliner" within the German episcopacy, had carefully contemplated the consequences of such a spectacular "resort to publicity", as he himself called his protests in a letter to his neighbour, Bishop Berning of Osnabrück, a correspondence that was discovered only in 1976. There he called it his conscientious duty to speak up publicly for freedom of the church and human dignity and "if necessary, sacrifice the own freedom and life". And, as he couldn't in the end convince the other bishops to go the way with him, he went alone.

On August 3, 1941, Galen thundered from the pulpit of his see, St. Lambert's church: "Woe to men, woe to our German people, if God's holy Commandment, 'Thou shalt not kill,' is not only disobeyed but if this transgression is also tolerated and goes unpunished."

Galen's secretary, who was present at St Lambert's for the sermon, recalled the scene. The bishop prayed for several minutes before he mounted the steps of the pulpit. There was a quiver in the first few sentences; after that he spoke with a great strength and composure. His towering figure left an impression of great dignity and superior presence. His voice sounded like thunder as the challenging words fell on the expectant congregation, some trembling, some gazing at him with tears in their eyes. Protest, indignation, fiery enthusiasm surged successively. The calm, the self-assurance, and latent power of Galen's delivery that morning in St Lambert's. This unwavering strength in those unnerving circumstances would remain with him all the way during the rest of his struggle against the Nazi regime.

At the end of July 1941, the chaplain at the mental asylum in Marienthal in the diocese of Münster, called on the bishop to inform him about one more sinister experience. A number of the mentally ill patients had been removed to be killed because they were 'unproductive'. This was what triggered off Galen's historic sermon, in which he attacked the Nazi practice of euthanasia and condemned the "mercy killings" taking place in his own diocese.

A curse on men if we break the holy commandment 'Thou shalt not kill'

Now, again at St. Lambert's, he condemned this ghastly doctrine which tried 'to justify the murder of blameless men', and which sought 'to give legal sanction to the forceable killing of invalids, cripples, the incurable and the incapacitated'. He had ascertained at the Ministry of Health that no attempt was made to hide the fact that many mentally ill people had already been purposely killed and that the process would continue. He called the perpetrators of these crimes murderers and demanded protection for the innocent. "If", he said, "the principle is established that unproductive human beings may be killed, then God help all those invalids who, in order to produce wealth, have given their all and sacrificed their strength of body. If all unproductive people may thus be violently eliminated, then woe betide our brave soldiers who return home wounded, maimed or sick. Once admit the right to kill unproductive persons, then none of us can be sure of his life. A curse on men and on the German people if we break the holy commandment 'Thou shalt not kill'... Woe to us German people if we not only licence this heinous offence but allow it to be committed with impunity".

The impact of his sermon reached far beyond the crowded congregation that flocked to hear him. Thousands of copies were distributed throughout the country; they were, too, smuggled to soldiers at the front where his references to the threat of death hanging over invalids and seriously wounded soldiers spread with lighting speed.

Galen's words had an unexpected, amazing and powerful effect. By the end of August, the programme for euthanasia had been suspended, but roughly 100,000 people had been killed already.

Copies of these 1941 sermons spread all over Germany; hundreds of thousands were printed in response to requests from many cities. These and other sermons were so important to the Allies that they were printed by the million and dropped by the RAF as anti-Nazi propaganda all over Germany and the occupied territories. The Nazi party staged a campaign against the bishop all over the country. Official German documents discovered after the war records of discussions among Nazi leaders about how to get rid of him. In Berlin, his sermons were regarded as 'the strongest attack against the German political leadership for decades' and he was declared to show staatsfeindliche Gesinnung, an attitude hostile to the German state as the Nazis understood it, usually akin to a death warrant. But the Nazis still hesitated to harm Galen personally, not to cause an uprising in the Münsterland, but planned instead to kill him after the "Endsieg".

Galen's see, St Lambert's Church, Lambertikirche zu Münster, the place of his his fateful sermons.

Hitler had any reason to fear him far beyond his regional importance as a bishop, because of the powerful anti-Nazi propaganda Galen provided to the Allies. One of the directors of propaganda in the British War Office, Brigadier R. L. Sedgwick, a convert to Catholicism, recalled that during the war the BBC sent out transmissions specifically targeting the forty million German and Austrian Catholics. Day after day, the broadcasts from London drove home the point of Hitler's hatred for the Catholic faith. The bishop's sermons, Sedgwick said, were like manna from heaven in the propaganda war against the Nazis. The BBC transmissions, drawing on these sermons, also endeavored to show that National Socialism implicated a serious threat to the family and the religious and ethical ideals for which it stood.

It was a great consolation for the bishop to know that by his words he had given courage and heart to those of his countrymen who repudiated everything Nazism stood for. Towards the end of August, he received a letter from the bishop of Innsbruck, telling him that the Holy Father had read his recent homilies aloud to his closest associates in the Vatican, expressing the strongest possible approval of them. Shortly afterwards, he received a letter of warm congratulation from Pius XII: "They (the sermons) have caused us also consolation and satisfaction such as we have not felt for a long time on the path of sorrows which we have followed with the Catholics of Germany".

Münster Cathedral, der Dom zu Münster, in today's restored state

He Wept in Silence

On October 10, 1943 Münster cathedral was bombed to rubble by the British. It was a Sunday. In the early afternoon, under a clear autumn sky, when the congregation had gathered in front the doorway to celebrate the motherhood of Mary and the high altar blazed with candles, the sirens howled. The first high explosive bomb fell with extreme precision on the vault of the west quadrant. From above, the west entrance of the cathedral, crowned by imposing Romanesque towers, was a target difficult to miss. The survivors fled, seeking shelter under the walls of the tower. Seemingly as solid as the sky, those towers had watched over the city of Münster for seven centuries. The second high explosive bomb hit them square. They fell, toppling like a garbage heap. Then a downpour of incendiary bombs followed, which lit the hit buildings up like torches. In a few minutes the proud ancient city of Münster went up in flames.

Canon Alois Schröer reported: "When the sirens sounded the alarm the bishop was putting on his vestments to go into the cathedral. He had no time to get to the air-raid shelter. High explosive bombs hit and destroyed his residence. He stood clutching the only wall left standing". When his secretary Heinrich Portmann found him while the planes were still flying over the city "I saw the Most Reverend Monsignor up above, under the open sky among the smoking ruins... miraculously he was unharmed. With difficulty I helped him down.... Later, in the shelter of the Ludgerianum College, I told him of the faithful who had died... of Vicar Emmerich and of the fifty nine nuns of the Charity of Saint Clement, who had all flown to heaven together from their convent, which had been hit squarely by an incendiary bomb. That night he asked me to accompany him to the cathedral. He stood there, motionless, in front of that rubble devoured by the flames. He wept in silence".

The destroyed city of Münster and Bishop Count Galen among the debris of the Cathedral square

Because of the damage to the city, the bishop and the diocesan administration had to move out to Sendenhorst, a small town about 20 km South East of Münster. As the weeks wore on and the Allies advanced, the bombardment of the towns became more and more intense. Bishop Galen was saddened by the constant flow of bad news, of destruction and death.

On Easter Sunday, March 31, 1945, American tanks finally rolled into Sendenhorst. Bishop Galen personally drove out to meet and welcome them, whereupon he entered into regular contact with the provisional military government for the assistance of his people, giving encouragement and hope to both sides. On 12 April, the Bishop went to Münster for the first time since it had been occupied by the Americans. His purpose was to make a public protest against the excesses of the freed Russian and Polish slave labourers who had been released by the Allies. They had been abominably treated and now, unrestricted by the military, were taking their revenge. Galen preached and protested as ardently against any injustices then as he had done so before, and on July, 24 1945 he had to account for his actions at a tribunal of the military government in Warendorf. He explained frankly that he would follow, as always, his pastoral duties and not abide to any directives and that they could do what they like with him. Thomas Mann, far away California, ridiculed him in July 1945 and mocked what he considered Galen's 'patriotic idiocies'.

Politically, the bishop was, not too surprisingly, deeply conservative. A befitting memorial for the man Galen was set up by the British Foreign Office by describing him as "the most outstanding personality among the clergy in the British zone.... Statuesque in appearance and uncompromising in discussion, this oak-bottomed old aristocrat ... is a German nationalist through and through."

He had a mountain of correspondence to deal with from all parts of Germany. There were queues waiting for him at all hours of the day with all the anxieties of a people devastated by the war and its terrible consequences. Reporters came from all parts of the world trying to get interviews with the bishop who had defied the Nazi regime, and who had lived to tell the tale. The writer of these lines knows from contemporary personal witness that Bishop Count Galen worked in his shirtsleeves together with those who removed the debris that once had been the city of Münster.

In a letter dated 25 September 1945 Pope Pius XII he talked about the "the terrible conditions in the occupied territories" and begged him to intervene with "direct help through remonstrations to the victorious powers". On 6 January 1946 he had gone to celebrate the Epiphany in the ruins of the sanctuary of the town of Telgte. He closed his sermon with the words: "Under Nazism I publicly declared, and I also wrote it directly to Hitler in 1939, when no power was then intervening to block his expansionist aims: 'Justice is the basis of the State; if justice is not re-established, then our people will die from inner putrefaction'. Today I must declare: if the law is not respected among peoples, then peace and concord among peoples will never come."

The First Bishop of Münster Ever To Wear The Purple

Earlier, the Sunday before Christmas, it had been announced on the wireless that Pope Pius XII was going to create thirty new cardinals, among them Bishop Count Galen, Galen's cousin the Bishop of Berlin Konrad Graf Preysing and the Archbishop of Cologne, Joseph Frings. Galen would be the first bishop of Münster ever to wear the Purple.

Cardinal Count Galen on board of the US Airforce plane that took him (different from the erroneous German caption) home from --not to-- Rome

That he had earned it was the unanimous verdict of the Catholic world. After his famous 1941 sermons, letters arrived by the hundred at the episcopal palace to thank the Bishop of Münster for his courageous stand. Now five years later, letters of congratulation poured in by the thousands, cheering the honour bestowed on him. They were from people from every walk of life, academics, professional people, soldiers, non-Catholics, non-believers, government representatives -- the list was endless.

"God bless you, God bless your country"

The travel to Rome took seven days in post-war Europe. On Thursday morning, February 18, 1946, the new cardinals finally received the Red Hat from Pius XII in St Peter's in the public consistory. They then processed from the Blessed Sacrament Chapel, where they had taken the oath always to defend the rights of the Holy Church, to the main altar, where the Holy Father was enthroned. Each national group in the huge congregation greeted their cardinal with applause. In a detailed account of the ceremony, the priest who was assigned train-bearer to Bishop Count Galen reported: "When the cardinals were entering St. Peter and Clemens August appeared at the door, a murmur came up from the crowd. 'There he is!' I, as train-bearer, walked immediately behind the cardinal and could hear what people said and when his towering figure crossed the central aisle, a wave of great joy arose. The applause turned into thundering ovations when the cardinal mounted the steps to the throne of the Holy Father." As the Italian newspapers described it the next day: Un applauso trionfale! The Holy Father imposed the red hat, and, as he leaned forward to embrace Galen, he whispered, "God bless you, God bless your country". When Galen turned to face the vast crowd he was greeted with a storm of applause led by the other cardinals, which lasted several minutes. The crowd in St Peter's that morning were conscious they were witnessing a unique event, a recognition of moral and physical courage on a par with that of the Roman martyrs of the nascent Christian Church.

After visiting a number of German POW camps in Italy, where he already appeared to be not feeling well, he returned to Germany in a plane, graciously provided by the US Airforce, and on the afternoon of Saturday 16th March, his 68th birthday, he arrived home in triumph to his episcopal city. Fifty thousand people had congregated around the great pile of rubble, which had once been the proud cathedral of Münster.

Cardinal Count Galen's reception in front of destroyed Münster cathedral on his return from Rome

He responded to all the addresses of welcome and congratulation with the simple dignity by which he was always known. Neither he nor the huge crowd who listened with pride and joy to his words realized that this was to be their bishop's farewell. His fight, so he told them, had been made possible by the unshakeable faith of the people of Münster; it was the staunch spirit of this unconquerable diocese that was the cause of his being alive that day. When he returned to his rooms after the fireworks display, he did not feel well.

The Only Man Who Had Stood Up for Their Rights Was Dead

The following day, Sunday 17th, he said a pontifical High Mass. His last words to the faithful of Münster were an exhortation to papal loyalty, especially to the reigning pope, Pius XII. The choir sang the Te Deum in celebration. Unfortunately, he wouldn't allow a doctor to be called until Tuesday morning. The diagnosis was serious and the operation revealed a perforation of the appendix. It was too late for the doctors to do anything about it. He died on Friday, March 22.


He lay in state for four days in the Church of St Mauritz during which an unending procession filed past the catafalque. It is not difficult to imagine the sense of loss which the people of Münster suffered. The only man who had ever stood up for their rights was now dead.

On March 28 the burial took place.

The same crowd that just a week before had shouted in joy and celebration at their cardinal's triumphant return from Rome, now stood silent and stunned in the rubble of the streets of Münster as the huge coffin, drawn by four horses, passed.

The cardinal's last resting place was the Galen Chapel amid the ruins of his cathedral, where the remains of a former Galen, Prince Bishop Christoph Bernhard, had been laid to rest in 1678. As the cardinal's coffin was lowered into the ground, a mighty sound rose up from the congregation, as they sang the magnificent Easter hymn Wahrer Gott wir glauben Dir ("True God We Believe in You", incidentally the work of another son of Münster, Christoph Bernhard Verspoell, dated 1810). It resounded through the ruins of the cathedral and the vestiges of the streets and lanes, bearing witness to the unconquerable hope, faith and spirit of the people of Münster.

Postscriptum:

On November 16, 2004, in the presence of Pope John Paul II, the Congregation for Causes of Saints promulgated a decree linking a miracle to Cardinal Clemens August Count Galen and on October 9, 2005 Galen was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI, and not surprisingly to the chagrin of the "progressive" fellowship in- and outside the Catholic Church.

Pope John Paul II and Bishop Reinhard Lettmann 1987 at Cardinal Galen's grave

The Catholic Church, so far, has been remarkably hesitant in beatifying its own leading members of the German resistance. Until Galen's beatification, only one, a layman, the Catholic labour leader and editor Nikolaus Gross (1898-1945), who was beheaded in Plötzensee prison in Berlin, was thus elevated.

Galen's rise to a position preceding sainthood is important for a number of reasons, of which the most poignant one is the fact, that, at a time, when euthanasia seems to have, again, become an acceptable practise in many Western countries, when the abortion of fetuses with Down's Syndrome, or just diagnosed with Down's Syndrome, has become a routine day-to-day operation and when children, having undergone a "late term termination of pregnacy", survive their own abortion, Cardinal Galen's maxim is as important now as it was 70 years ago.

"There is no such thing as life unworthy of living."

---

Sources and further reading:

Information including the full text of his famous sermons and the Gestapo correspondence regarding Bishop Galen.

Blessed anti-Nazi Cardinal by Uwe Siemon-Netto.

A bishop under the moral bombs: The Lion of Münster, «the most relentless opponent of Nazism», as the New York Times described him in 1942, condemned the terrible Allied bombing that razed German cities to the ground. These pages contain the letters that the bishop wrote to Pius XII during the war years by Stefania Falasca.

Biographical information and pictures from the archives of the Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe.

Burgwald Dinklage with information on the Galen family history and the House Burg Dinklage.

Christendom Awake: FAITH AND FATHERLAND by Fr Thomas McGovern.

Hitlers Tischgespräche.