Were Catholics persecuted in Nazi Germany?

Question

I am confused because someone just told me that Hitler was Catholic. I have heard that the Nazis went after Catholics during the second world war. Is this true and if so why would he go after catholics if he were one himself?

Answer 1

A Clarafication - - -

HITLER may be d^mned for hating all sorts of people but Hitler was a politician and being a politician Hitler persecuted those Catholics who did not support his regime. Little known today (2007) is the fact that Hitler, most likely with the troika of Himmler & Heydrich & Streicher carefully played on a largely German Lutheran fear of 'gay' Priests and 'Lesbian' Nuns and scored a big public relations success by publicly closing several seminaries because 'there were faeries' running rampant and doing all sorts of bad things.
The Catholic Church held a precarious position in Germany. Numberous in Bavaria and the South, they were mostly outnumbered in the rest of Germany. This will anger a lot of Catholics BUT the truth can hurt. Once Hitler was in power he played the Catholic Church. Hitler's legal genius Hans Franks and others engineered several deals whereby the Catholic Church turned a blind eye to the treatment of Jews & Commies/Bolsheviks/Reds and Others (mostly Social-Democrats) and in return confiscted Jewish properties were given to the Catholic Church.
When Hitler did persecute Catholics it was mostly those Catholics who had angered other Catholics and though Hitler did, on the surface, slap down Catholic authority, it was more for show, and overall the Catholic Church made out o-k. To this day people inherently view Catholics as Noble & Pure and so they could not possibly have been Anti-Semetoc Jew haters.

http://www.claremontmckenna.edu/hist/jpetropoulos/church/tamerpage/index1.htm
"""The Center Party (CP) was the largest Catholic party in Germany until it dissolved itself in 1933. Neither the CP nor the Bavarian People’s Party (BPP), another Catholic party, were able to receive the full support of the Catholics at the polls. The CP and the BPP opposed the Nazi party until 1933. Both the church and the Catholic parties changed their attitude toward the Nazis after the Reichstag elections on March 5, 1933. The CP and the BPP won only 92 seats in the 647-seat German parliament. The Nazi party and its ally, the Hugenberg Nationalists, won 288 and 52 seats respectively. They constituted a majority but did not have enough seats to change the constitution, which required a two-thirds majority. Hitler’s first main goal was to establish his authority over the state. In order to take this step, Hitler had to persuade the CP and the BPP members to give their support. The day after the elections, Hitler declared that he would respect the present position of the church and would not change it. Negotiations between the Pope and the Nazi leaders were also initiated to discuss the position of Catholics in Germany.
The Catholic leaders trusted Hitler. The CP and the BPP brought about their own ends by supporting Hitler in his “Enabling Act,” giving Hitler extraordinary power. Without the support of Catholic parties, Hitler could not have reached his goal easily. For Catholics the vote became a loyalty issue toward the state. They were afraid of being called less patriotic than other Germans. The Catholics were hoping to save Catholic civil servants from Hitler's purge but they could not even save themselves in the end. On March 23, 1933, the Enabling Act was passed in the Reichstag. After the act was passed, bishops urged Catholics to support the state. Support was demanded not for the Nazis, but for the state itself. However, after the Enabling Act was passed the Nazis became “the state” and the state became synonymous to the Nazis.
After the Enabling Act was passed and the rights of Catholics became protected by the treaty between the Pope and the Nazi leaders, there was no need for the Center party. The CP dissolved itself on July 10, 1933, leaving the protection of German Catholics to the Nazis. Nazi Germany signed a concordat with the Pope on July 20, which made the Third Reich the guarantor of the civic and religious interests of German Catholics. The treaty gave guarantees for Catholic schools and continued governmental subsidies to the Church; it banned priests from participating in politics, and closed all the political, social and vocational organizations that made up the German Catholic sub-cultural infrastructure.
Hitler never respected this treaty. He shut down the Catholic Youth League, arrested Catholic priests and nuns, and suppressed the Catholic publications. The Pope responded to Hitler with a public encyclical on March 14, 1937. He criticized the German suppression of Catholics. He attacked Hitler without addressing him by name. “Whoever follows that so-called pre-Christian Germanic conception of substituting a dark and impersonal destiny for the personal God, denies thereby the Wisdom and Providence of God who "Reached from end to end mightily, and ordered all things sweetly" (Wisdom viii. 1). Neither is he a believer in God.”3
It is also claimed that Pius XI was planning to issue another encyclical regarding anti-Semitism and racism. He appointed some people to gather the documents and information about the subject. The text was prepared under the title of “The Unity of Human Races” but Pius XI’s death in February, 1939 left his efforts fruitless because his successor the Pius XII never published it.4 """

Peace.......... o o o pp pp oo oo pp pp oo oo

Answer 2

Persecution Of Catholics

Answer 3

Yea and no, many churches including the Catholic Church initially supported the Nazi anticommunist position. The Nazi and Catholic Church signed a noninterference agreement which Hitler broke. The Nazis in Germany confiscated Church land and formed its own Nazi religion. Which the Church attacked.Also, the Church denounced the Nazi activities in Germany. However the Catholic Church was just too big and too popular to meddle with seriously. But the Lutheran and protestant churches were easier to intimidate because they did not have a central international authority.

Answer 4

Hi,

Yes, some were. Hitler was born a Catholic but left the church and the sacraments at a very early age. Hitler realized that most Germans were Christian and that his administration had to tolerate them while keeping them in their place at the same time. His administration considered Christianity just a bastardized version of the Jewish religion. Hitler sometimes would speak well of "positive: Christianity in one speech then contradict himself by saying it was incompatible with National Socialism in the next. You can certainly not compare the number of Catholics or protestants to the Jewish loses but there were quite a few persecuted, killed or put in camps just the same when they spoke out or refused to co-operate with the state. In the longer term certain high ranking Nazis like Martin Bormann wanted this religion eradicated.

This article should shed a lot of light on your question:

"Though Hitler felt a particular urgency — and hatred — when dealing with Jews and Communists, he viewed the Catholic Church as a pernicious opponent, a deeply-entrenched threat that must be controlled and eventually uprooted from German life in order to establish his promised Thousand-Year-Reich. From his early years of political dreaming, from within the pages of Mein Kampf to the Table Talk Hitler himself made his contempt for the ‘slave’ ideology of Christianity and its Jewish roots perfectly clear. Though the scale of Christian persecution cannot be compared to the Jewish Holocaust of 1941-1945, except perhaps in Poland, the ultimate destruction of Christianity was one of the Nazis long-term aims. "


http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/history/world/wh0033.html

Mike k

Answer 5

Yes , Hitler went after Catholics Jews gay gypsies and those who spoke out or were against Nazism. Hitler was beorn a Catholic but had noe practiced his religion after the age of 7. He considered Catholics who protested him as no better than hybrid Jewry and alien to what he considered matters should be. Remember hitler belonged tp the occult religion and he really wanted the people worship as a god.

Answer 6

HItler may have been raised Catholic, but that don't mean he was Catholic. Under the Nazi regime, any outside authority was deamed a threat, however as a very large segment of the population was Catholic, that persecution was limited-no wholesale round-ups or deportations.
The "official" Nazi religion was a weird mix of the occult, Norse mythology & Christian mysticism.

Answer 7

No.
After the persecution of the jews began in the 1930s Hitler gave many priveleges to the Roman Catholics by arrangement with the Vatican.
They were both on the same side in their hatred of Communism and the Vatican backed Hitler all the way on this policy.
Anti-semitism was a long tradition of the Roman Catholics of Europe and most of them had no problem with Hitler's actions against jews.

Answer 8

In Nazi Germany Catholics were not targeted for being Catholics. There wer persecuted only if they were Jewish origin or helped Jews.

Answer 9

Yes.

It is only right to place the Jews first on the list of the Nazis' victims. The 6,000,000 murdered Jews (1,500,000 of them were children) represented two-thirds of all Jews in Europe and one-third of all Jews worldwide.

However millions of Catholics and other Christians were also killed. No one knows exactly how many. I've seen claims of up to 42,000,000 but I could not find documentation for this number.

One example, over 6 million Poles perished during WWII. That was 22% of the population of the country. Three million were Jews. Most of the rest were Catholics.

Two of the most famous Catholics who died in the concentration camps are:

Saint (Sister) Teresa Benedicta (Edith Stein) died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz on 9 August 1942. http://www.ewtn.com/faith/edith_stein.htm

Saint (Father) Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish priest who died as prisoner number 16770 in Auschwitz, on August 14, 1941. http://www.auschwitz.dk/Kolbe.htm

Also remember most the the allied military dead were Christians.

A Soviet KGB plot to implicate Pope Pius XII and the Catholic Church with the Nazis in the Holocaust has recently been uncovered. See these articles:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YTUzYmJhMGQ5Y2UxOWUzNDUyNWUwODJiOTEzYjY4NzI=
http://www.the-tidings.com/2007/021607/difference.htm

For more information, see: http://www.holycross.edu/departments/history/vlapomar/hiatt/catholic.htm

With love in Christ.

Answer 10

Yes Catholics were persecuted in nazi Germany.He would go after Catholics even if he was one because he was insane
Jews,Catholics,Gypies,Gay People,Christians who helped Jews,anyone who was thought to not be loyal to the nazi party