Germany Executes Her "Unfit"

Out of the fastness of Germany has come the story of an act as terrible in its cruelty as any known of Hitler's regime.

... Pope Plus XII decrees the policies which his bishops are to follow. It is a decree signed by the Notary of the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office; it is entitled "Concerning the Direct Killing of the Innocent Done by Order of Public Authority."

The decree is in the form of a question sent to the Pope by an unnamed bishop. It reads: "It was asked of this Supreme Sacred Congregation: 'Whether, by order of public authority, it is licit directly to kill those who, although they have committed no crime deserving death, yet, because of mental or physical defects, are no longer able to benefit the nation, and are considered rather to burden the nation and to obstruct its energy and strength.'"

The bishop was a German bishop. He asked whether it was right for thousands of infirm and aged Germans to be put to death by Adolf Hitler because they were no longer of service in Hitler's war economy.

The decree continues: "In a general session of the Supreme Sacred Congregation held on Wednesday, November 27, 1940, the Eminent and Most Reverend Cardinals appointed to safeguard faith and morals, having heard the 'votum' of the Reverend Doctors Consultors, ordered that it must replied:

"'in the negative,' since it is contrary to natural and divine positive law." This decree Pope Plus approved and ordered to be published.

The facts are these: in September, October and November of 1940, 85,000 blind, incurably ill or aged Germans were put to death by the Gestapo. They were put to death as casually as the SPCA chloroforms old and helpless dogs.

Later, according to the accounts of these priests, the Gestapo found that poisoning was unnecessarily expensive. Gas chambers were used, the priests reported, until the Nazis found an even simpler method which involved no cost at all. Air bubbles were injected into the veins of those chosen to die, and death was instantaneous when the bubbles reached the heart.

From the pulpits in Germany Catholic priests began to unveil this appalling story. They delivered sermons protesting against euthanasia and sterilization, and they were strengthened in their stand on December 16 by the decree of the Vatican which has been quoted and which warned that euthanasia was contrary to the laws of the Church.

The reply of the Nazis was drastic and immediate. More than three hundred Catholic priests were imprisoned in concentration camps, and the publication of the decree in the churches of Germany was forbidden.

Today the practice of euthanasia is still continuing in Germany and the persecution of the Catholics has been intensified. Refugees report that religious education has been abolished and Sunday schools closed. Catholic members of the Hitler Jugend, the Bund Deutscher Mädchen, and the Arbeitsdienst are discouraged from attending church. Abbeys monasteries, and convents are used to quarter Germans brought to the Reich from Rumania, Russia, and the Baltic countries. The Episcopal sees of Aachen, Paderborn, and Cologne, are vacant because the Nazis prevented the nomination of new bishops, while at Rottenburg, Bishop Sproll was exiled and his palace fired and destroyed because he refused to vote for Hitler in a "free election." In Poland, where the monasteries have been seized and sometimes destroyed, the Catholics suffered most of all, although the campaign to exterminate the Church has been carried on in Austria, Czecho-Slovakia, Belgium, and France as well. Unlike the Jews, however, Catholics are seldom permitted to leave Germany. The church dignitary who gave me this information charges that the majority of the 800,000 prisoners in German concentration camps are Catholics.

A good one. ;-) It reads a lot like Queen Victoria's formal proclaimations. I have never seen this in any of New Zealand's formal governmental documents published after WWII. Hong Kong is different: the style was seen everywhere up until 1997 when plain English style (in sync with the Chinese language version)
was adopted after HK became a PRC Special Administrative Region.

Seriously speaking, Chinese-language forums based in Hong Kong tend to have very strict guidelines on posting old news. Moderators are very fuzzy in requesting anyone posting historical information with headings like [History] or [Retrospective Post]. I think it is very useful in cases for not only Nazi-era Germany, but also places like pre-1947 India ("Indian government" pre-1947 would have meant the pre-independence British Indian administration and similar "India" would have include Pakistan and Bangladesh in our time) or even China. Heck, I don't want to get up one day, and found a headline "China declares war on the world" or "Influenza epidemic reaches New Zealand" here before realizing they are about Boxer Rebellion of 1900 or influenza epideic of 1918! ;-)

Great article, thank you for posting it!

On the Church and the Holocaust

Excerpts from books and periodicals that have covered this subject:

The foremost Jewish Scholar of the Holocaust at its height in Hungary, Jeno Levai, insisted some years ago that it was a "particularly regrettable irony that the one person in all of occupied Europe who did more than anyone else to halt the dreadful crime and alleviate its consequences is today made the scapegoat for the failures of others."
The Israeli diplomat and scholar Pinchas Lapide concluded his careful review of Pius XII’s wartime activities with the following words: "The Catholic Church under the pontificate of Pius XII was instrumental in saving lives of as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands." He went on to add that this "figure far exceeds those saved by all other Churches and rescue organizations combined." After recounting statements of appreciation from a variety of preeminent Jewish spokespersons, he noted. "No Pope in history has been thanked more heartily by Jews . . . .Several suggested in open letters that a Pope Pius XII forest of 860,000 trees be planted on the hills of Judea in order to fittingly honor the memory of the late Pontiff ("Three Popes and the Jews" pp. 214–215)." Levai in his own book did not hesitate to argue that the attacks on the Pope’s wartime record are "demonstrably malicious and fabricated . . . . The archives of the Vatican of diocesan authorities of Ribbentrop’s foreign ministry, contain a whole series of protests—direct and indirect, diplomatic and public, secret and open. The nuncios and bishops of the Catholic Church intervened again and again on the instructions of the Pope," he wrote. Their interventions were just as unsuccessful as the demands and threats of the British and American governments. Moreover, the delicacy of the matter was often heightened by the fact that such protests could put Jews themselves and their protectors at additional corporal risk.
Hungarian Jews and the Papacy: The former chief rabbi of Rome during the German occupation, Emilio Zolli, concluded his firsthand account of wartime events thus: "Volumes could be written on the multiform works of Pius XII, and the countless priests, religious and laity who stood with him throughout the world during the war." "No hero," he said, "in all of history was more militant, more fought against, none more heroic, than Pius XII in pursuing the works of true charity . . . and thus on behalf of all the suffering children of God." Zolli was so moved by Pius XII’s work that he became a Catholic after the war and took the Pope’s name (Before the Dawn). Lapide acknowledged in his book that the Church "in an endless flood of sermons, allocutions, pastoral letters and encyclicals was a clear and unrelenting foe to all forms of racism at the time, and everyone knew it—Jews, Poles, Russians and most ominously the Nazi secret police." Their files mention recalcitrant Catholic clergy in this regard more than any other group.
The New York Times in its Christmas editorials of 1941 and 1942 praised Pius XII for his moral leadership as a "lonely voice crying out of the silence of a continent" and for, among other things, assailing "the violent occupation of territory, and the exile and persecution of human beings, for no other reason than race." No other institution produced more heroes during the Holocaust than the Church: Italian, Slovak, French, Hungarian priests, nuns, and laypersons who risked and often gave their lives for the sake of persecuted Jews. This too deserves remembrance and respect.
Golda Meir, Israel’s representative to the United Nations, was the first of the delegates to react to the news of Pope Pius XII’s death. She sent an eloquent message: "We share in the grief of humanity at the passing away of His Holiness, Pope Pius XII. In a generation afflicted by wars and discords he upheld the highest ideals of peace and compassion. When fearful martyrdom came to our people in the decade of Nazi terror, the voice of the Pope was raised for its victims. The life of our times was enriched by a voice speaking out about great moral truths above the tumult of daily conflict. We mourn a great servant of peace."
Leonard Bernstein, on learning of Pope Pius XII’s death while conducting his orchestra in New York’s Carnegie Hall, tapped his baton for a moment of silence to pay tribute to the Pope who had saved the lives of so many people without distinction of race, nationality, or religion.
The great Jewish physicist, Albert Einstein, who himself barely escaped annihilation at Nazi hands, made the point well in 1944 when he said, "Being a lover of freedom, when the Nazi revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, but the universities were immediately silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers, but they, like the universities were silenced in a few short weeks. Then I looked to individual writers . . . . they too were mute. Only the Church," Einstein concluded, "stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing the truth. . . . I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel great affection and admiration . . . . and am forced thus to confess that what I once despised, I now praise unreservedly."

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