The Catholic Standard and Times

The Lion of Munster:
Bishop Clemens August von Galen

By Susan Brinkmann
CS&T Correspondent

The killings took place quietly and without the public’s knowledge, in hospitals and medical clinics throughout Germany, beginning in the fall of 1939.

The killings were carried out by lethal injection, deliberate starvation, or carbon monoxide poisoning. Everyone involved in them considered them acts of compassion because the victims suffered from disabilities, mentally illness, advanced old age, or incurable disease.

Hundreds of thousands died before the public caught on.

But once the program became known, the Fuhrer’s program was doomed. Public outrage was swift and bold. People demonstrated in the streets, clergy railed from pulpits, and some of Germany’s most prominent citizens decried the so called “mercy killings” that were masquerading as medical procedures.
One man soon distinguished himself as a leader of the resistance — a bishop of noble birth, who dared to call Hitler’s euthanasia program what it was: “homicidal folly.”

Bishop Clemens August von Galen, known as the “Lion of Munster,” was so hated by the Nazis that Joseph Goebbels, the notorious Nazi Minister of Propaganda, longed to see him hanged. The head of the German S.S. considered him a traitorous pig, and Hitler, himself, promised to reckon with the Bishop at the end of the war, exacting retribution “down to the last penny.”

That day never came. Bishop von Galen became one of the few men in history to escape the cross-hairs of Adolf Hitler.

Born into a noble Catholic family from Westphalia on March 16, 1878, Bishop von Galen spent 23 years as a parish priest in Berlin before he was consecrated bishop in September 1933.

Visible in the crowd at his installation were plenty of helmets with swastikas. By then, trouble was already brewing between the Church and Hitler.

Only a few months before Bishop von Galen’s installation, the Holy See had signed the Concordat — a document defining how the Church could exercise her religious rights in Germany under the totalitarian Nazi regime. It looked better on paper than in reality. The Church had little, if any, religious freedom; not even the law of God was above Nazi policy.

Bishop von Galen, who took as his episcopal motto, “Neither with praise nor fear,” saw the many breaches in this “agreement” between the Church and the regime, and was vigorous in his vocal protest. But at the time, Hitler was still claiming that he was not against religion and was actually promoting “real Christianity.”

In his book, “Myth of the Twentieth Century,” the foremost Nazi theologian, Alfred Rosenberg, proposed a “positive Christianity” instead of “negative Christianity”— which, he said, was being practiced by other churches.

Rosenberg contended that St. Paul had been a “political Jew” who crafted a religion based on humility and mercy rather than a religion of “liberation” taught by Jesus. In fact, among Rosenberg’s many baseless claims was that Jesus was not of Jewish descent.

Thousands of copies of his book were circulated throughout Germany. According to historian Robert Royal, that was a typical Nazi tactic — attempting to co-opt the Church while secretly subverting it.

The Bishop wasn’t fooled. In his first pastoral letter, at Easter 1934, he called the book a “religious sham” and said it “repudiates revelation and aims to destroy the foundations of Christianity. … Sometimes this new paganism happens to hide even under Christian names.”

His letter warned Catholics not to be seduced by Rosenberg’s “poison for consciences” and cautioned parents to keep a close eye on their children.

The regime was not pleased. Herman Goring, the head of the Gestapo, responded by demanding that all clergy be banned from teaching in schools. Meanwhile, Rosenberg rushed to Munster and tried to incite people against the Bishop.

It didn’t work.

Most of the people in the Catholic stronghold of Westphalia rallied around their bishop. A procession in his support was held July 8 that year, and news of the spectacular event spread quickly to neighboring towns and countries.

The courageous behavior of the German bishop was picked up by the foreign press. “If the Catholics are accused of meddling in politics,” said Paris’ LeFigaro, “in reality, it is National Socialism that is meddling in religion.”

Hitler’s regime stepped up its periodic persecution of the Church after Pius XI issued the encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge in 1937 in which he expressed regret over signing the Concordat because the Nazis had made it abundantly clear that their only aim was “a war of extermination.”

Persecution of the Church became severe once World War II began: The Gestapo began confiscating Church property, deporting religious, and appropriating monastaries.

At one point, Bishop von Galen faced down the Gestapo in person, calling them “thieves and brigands.”

The following day, he climbed into the pulpit and recounted all of the “infamous acts” and abuses he’d learned about.

“None of us is safe … from being taken from his own house, stripped of his freedom, imprisoned in the concentration camps of the state’s secret police,” Bishop von Galen warned. “I am aware that this can also happen to me today. … I cry out: We demand justice!”

A witness said the people in his congregation “rose to their feet, voices lifted in agreement and also in terror and indignation. … I saw people burst into tears.”

The next week, Bishop von Galen’s church was packed. Again the “Lion of Munster” thundered against the Nazis — against “the inequitable, intolerable action that is imprisoning priests, hunting our religious and our dear sisters like rabbits. … Now we clearly see and feel what lies behind the new doctrine that has been imposed on us for years: hatred. Hatred deep as an abyss toward Christianity, toward mankind.”

But it was the Bishop’s sermon the following Sunday, August 3, that revealed the secret extermination program, which had been going on in hospitals and medical clinics for years: “Now defenseless innocents are killed — barbarously killed. People also of a different race, of different origins, are suppressed.

“We are faced with a homicidal folly without equal. With people like this — with these assassins who are proudly trampling our lives — I can no more share belonging to the same people,” the Bishop said. He ended the sermon with the convicting words of St. Paul: “Their God is their belly!”

The sermon was reported around the world, reaching even the soldiers at the front. The Fuhrer’s Office of Propaganda called it “the fiercest frontal attack unleashed on Nazism in all the years of its existence.”

Everyone, including Bishop von Galen, expected he would be executed without delay.

But Goebbels realized that martyring him would alienate a large part of the population, including some of the soldiers fighting at the front. The Nazis decided to let him live for the time being.

Hitler later told intimates: “A man like Bishop von Galen knows full well what I shall exact in retribution to the last farthing. And if he doesn’t succeed in getting himself transferred in the meanwhile to the Collegium Germanicus in Rome, he may rest assured that in the balancing of accounts, no “T” will be left uncrossed—no “I” left undotted.”

Bishop von Galen outlived Adolph Hitler by nine months.

He died of appendicitis on Mar. 22, 1946, only a month after he was elevated to cardinal.

The cause for his canonization was commenced by his successor in Munster almost immediately. On Dec. 20, 2004, the Vatican announced plans to beatify Bishop von Galen after the miraculous healing in 1995 of an Indian student, Henrikus Nahak, was attributed to his intercession.

Contact Susan Brinkmann at fiat723@aol.com or (215) 965-4615