THE ROMAN Catholic Church in Germany has released a report detailing its use of slave labour during the Nazi era. The report commissioned in 2000 by the German Catholic Bishops’ Conference found that during the war church institutions employed 4,829 civilians and 1,075 prisoners of war as slave labourers.
The Archbishop of Mainz, Cardinal Karl Lehmann said the 700-page history entitled “Forced Labour in the Catholic Church 1939-1945″ found that 776 church hospitals, homes, monasteries, farms and gardens were provided with slave labour imported from Russia, Poland and the Ukraine by the Nazi regime.
“The comparatively small number of labourers, many of whom spent barely a year working in Catholic institutions, doesn’t even amount to a thousandth of the estimated total of 13 million forced labourers employed throughout the Reich,” Cardinal Lehmann said at a press conference broadcast on German television on April 8.
“But it remains an historical burden which will continue to challenge our church in the future. There is no collective guilt, but as Christians and as a church we are aware of the responsibility that results from the burden of the past,” the former president of the German Catholic Bishops Conference said.
It seems that the guilty are always able to admit their error about 50 years after the event. This assures them that no survivors are living to tell the real tale-i.e., the Swiss banks involvement in stealing assets from the Jews, Japanese attrocities to the Chinese, and reparations to victims of the forced internments of our Japanese citizens. Of all however, the Catholic Church bears the most guilt for their silence during the Holocaust and their cooperation with the Nazis during WWII and their coverup of sexual abusers.
[i]There is no collective guilt…[/i]
I’m not so sure about that, especially when it is an entire system/culture/bureaucracy involved. I would say there is collective guilt in the case of the sexual abuse crisis, and probably in this case as well.
Now, of course, whether a person insinuates themselves into that collective guilt has to do with their individual actions that either perpetuate or repudiate the particular sin and the systemic problems and culture from which they arose. And that is an ongoing process for all of us.
Bushwacker, I had planned on posting some documents which would show the error and malice of your post. But that would serve no useful purpose and could too easily degenerate into violation of the Christian’s obedience to Charity. So instead I offer you this
“Prayers of St. Teresa Benedicta
“O my God, fill my soul with holy joy, courage and strength to serve You. Enkindle Your love in me and then walk with me along the next stretch of road before me. I do not see very far ahead, but when I have arrived where the horizon now closes down, a new prospect will open before me, and I shall meet it with peace.”
“When night comes, and retrospect shows that everything was patchwork and much that one had planned left undone, when so many things rouse shame and regret, then take all as is, lay it in God’s hands, and offer it up to Him. In this way we will be able to rest in Him, actually to rest and to begin the new day like a new life.”
On August 2, 1942, Edith was taken from her monastery and transported by cattle train to the death camp of Auschwitz. The conditions in the box cars were so inhuman that many died or went insane on the four day trip. She died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz and was cremated at the age of 51 on August 9, 1942. She was beatified by Pope John Paul II at Cologne on May 1, 1987, and canonized in Rome twelve years later.
The myth that the Vatican collaborated with Nazis or did nothing whatever to resist has been debunked many times over.
It is appropriate for the German Catholic Church to make this admission. This is something only one generation removed from the present. Many, many Germans, including many Protestants, cooperated with the Nazi regime in one way or another. Many Germans continue to be aware today of the sins of the former generations.
Before assessing guilt, it would be useful to know how the Church treated its slave laborers. If these people were cruelly exploited by the Church, then of course it should be condemned. But what if the Church used this as an opportunity to provide shelter for Slavs and Jews, who might otherwise have been starved, worked to death or gassed? We really need to know more.
Thank goodness I got busy and couldn’t post my response to this too quickly. Katherine, Paula, and InNewark have said it with more charity and clarity than I would have.
And it’s worth remembering that Oscar Shindler’s workers could well have been considered “slave labor”. And, come to think of it, wasn’t he a Catholic? Sort of?
It’s always worth asking what people mean when they speak of an organization in the collective sense. Just who is this “Catholic Church” that bears all this guilt? Is it Pius XII (may he be canonized soon!), slandered as silent and complicit, but who was actually called (by that Catholic in-house organ, the New York Times) the single clear voice against Nazism on the European continent. While our President Roosevelt refused entry to the U.S. for European Jews, Pius XI issued an encyclical (written by the future Pius XII, it’s said) against Nazism. Are these men “the Catholic Church”? Are the 1000 Catholic priests who went to Auschwitz “the Catholic Church”? Are the bishops and priests who really did collaborate with the Nazis “the Catholic Church”?
Well, this may be sort of like “Piling on” in football when the ball carrier is already down on the ground. I wholeheartedly agree with Paula, Katherine, and others above who have noted that the Roman Catholic Church has gotten lots of unfair condemnation for its collaboration with the wicked Nazi regime. The historical evidence is mixed. Yes, there was all too much giving in to the powers that be, but that was just as true of the main Protestant churches. But there is another side to the story that has often been overlooked or deliberately ignored.
That admirable journal, First Things, has often rehashed that controversy and debunked some of the very one-sided treatments by harsh critics of the Catholic Church. Or see Philip Jenkin’s well documented recent study, “The New Anti-Catholicism: the Last Acceptable Prejudice.”
From my perspective, the basic problem of “collaboration” with the cruel and anti-Christian Nazi regime lies not with Catholicism per se, or with Luthernaism for that matter, but with the whole Christendom model of Church-state relations. It’s EXTREMELY difficult for any Constantinian-type church to resist being co-opted and manipulated by the dominant political and cultural forces at any given time. And that most definitely has been true of Anglicanism, which has basically always caved in and surrendered to the demands of the State since the time of Henry VIII (or at least it has been captive to the aristocracy and the cultural elite).
That is why I keep harping on the NECESSITY for a radical transition to a “High Commitment, Post-Christendom style Anglicanism of a sectarian, Christ-against-culture sort.”
David Handy+
Certainly the difficulties the Anglican Communion is having with the present Archbishop’s unwillingness to take action called for by the council of international archbishops is a case in point, New Reformation.
I have read several books by Polish and Austrian women who were taken to Germany as slave labor, and it pretty much saved their lives. Often they were fairly well fed, as they needed to be kept healthy for work. Some found themselves nursing German wounded military who assisted them in various ways, like helping them to send food packages to their families at home. When they got back home eventually, they found that family and friends left behind had almost all been deported to places like Auschwitz. There is an interesting book out about a Jewish hospital in Germany that was able to rescue hundreds of Jews, and remained open through the war. Slave labor sounds terrible, but the truth of the matter is that it may have been much better than the alternatives.
I have to commend the logic of support for slave labor. Another fine example is when Volkswagen allowed several hundred children to die in their own filth in a fake day care facility away from their mothers. Volkswagen was really helping those slave mothers by assuring them of a job during the war. Imagine if they had let those children live, the mothers probably wouldn’t be able to work and would have been killed.
#9 – You are right – sometimes discretion may be the better part of valor.
Have we forgotten the lesson of Schindler’s List?