Fathers Alfred Delp and Hermann Wehrle - martyr-priests murdered by the Nazis

Rev Dr Alfred Delp SJ and Rev Dr Hermann Wehrle SJ were both dragged before the Nazi People's Court on trumped up charges and martyred chiefly for being Catholic priests.

Fr Wehrle had merely heard the confession of a German cavalry officer, Major Ludwig Freiherr (Baron) von Leonrod, who was not even part of the 20th July plot to overthrow Hitler. He had declined to get involved.

Baron Leonrod was nevertheless condemned to death for not revealing what he knew about the plot, which was, in any case, very little.

Fr Wehrle knew even less but Baron Leonrod came to him for spiritual counsel and confession. Fr Wehrle gave him him open spiritual counsel and told him that tyrannicide was moral if the tyrant had no legal right to be leader.

Outspoken opposition to the Nazis by individual Jesuits resulted in harsh response from government officials, including imprisonment of priests in concentration camps.

The government takeover of church property, "Klostersturm", resulted in the loss of valuable properties such as that of Stimmen der Zeit, the Jesuit newspaper, and limited the work of the Jesuits in Germany. The Jesuit provincial, Rev Fr Augustin Rösch SJ, Father Delp's superior in Munich, became active in the underground resistance to Hitler.

It was Augustin Rösch who introduced Delp to the Kreisau Circle. As of 1942, Delp met regularly with the clandestine group around Helmuth James, Count von Moltke to develop a model for a new social order after the Third Reich came to an end. Delp's role was to explain Catholic social teaching to the group, and to arrange contacts between Moltke and Catholic leaders, including Archbishop (later Cardinal) Preysing of Berlin.

Rev Dr Augustin Roesch SJ, the Munich Jesuit Provincial
who clandestinely opposed Hitler and the Nazis

This was the difficulty for German Christians. Hitler had been voted in constitutionally. Was his government legitimate? Seemingly, then, yes. But then he had also usurped power as Chancellor but creating himself Fuehrer or "Leader" which was not a constitutionally recognised post. He had done so through the Ermaechtigungsgesetz or "Enabling" or "Empowering" Acts which purported to be constitutional but, in reality, could hardly be called so.

True, Chancellor Bruening (a Catholic) had persuaded President von Hindenburg to sign over to him the emergency powers under Article 34 of the Weimar Constitution but that was all legal and only temporary. This seemed different. But, on the other hand, the Weimar Constitution had only come in, after World War I, and in duress. Was it the last word on the subject?

All these debates, the 20th July plotters repeatedly considered, anxious to ensure that they behaved with impeccably correct morals and justice.

It is easy for us to sit back in our armchairs and say "what was the problem?". But we were not there and called upon to risk our lives. The issue is still live. As Catholics we are taught to obey the legitimately constituted government and not to seek to overthrow it unlawfully just because we do not like it. We do not have the right to impose upon others our own dislike of the government.

These distinctions were lost on a brutish thug like Roland Freisler, the ex-Communist then fanatical Nazi, President of the Nazi People's Court.

Newly released footage below shows the eloquent defence of Fr Hermann Wehrle and others and their ill treatment at the hands of the odious Freisler.

Rev Dr Hermann Josef Wehrle SJ
curate at Holy Blood Church, Munich,
martyred for the Faith in 1944

Freisler acts as both prosecutor and judge in a blatant breach of elementary natural justice and then, with all the venom he can muster, he screeches and screams at the victims earning himself the clandestine sobriquet "raving Roland".

He ensured that his victims, the false accused, were further humiliated by having them dressed in old ragged clothes, often without any belt to keep their trousers up, so that they appeared before this Nazi kangaroo court looking shabby, scruffy and humiliated, particularly those who had been generals or high officials.

Major Ludwig Freiherr (Baron) von Leonrod
German cavalry officer and devout Catholic aristocrat
martyred for the Faith in 1944

In these clips he finds Baron von Leonrod and Fr Wehrle, guilty of knowing of the 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, and of following Catholic theology in considering themselves not bound to reveal their knowledge (clearly because of Hitler's tyranny).

He then condemns them to death, to be hanged by wire, suspended from meat hooks, in the cells of Ploetzensee prison as "enemies of the Reich" but, in reality and in the eyes of God, as deeply heroic Christian martyrs.

We salute their courage in standing firm before the odious treachery, heathen villainy and pagan devilishness of the National Socialist German Worker's Party and its atrocious, diabolical leadership who, with their symbol of a cross with arms broken, the satanic swastika, declared war on the old, royal, noble and Catholic Germany of men like Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg, Baron Ludwig von Leonrod and Fathers Delp and Wehrle.

See, in these clips, how these Catholic heroes had to explain their innermost thoughts to the brutal, insensitive Freisler who was wholly incapable of understanding the careful moral reasoning of men like Fr Wehrle.

He screams at them and then declares, in solemn tones: "Sie werden mit dem Tode bestraft", "they shall be punished with death!".

Freisler, who had been a Communist in his youth, had been sent to the Soviet Union to learn how they conducted their show trials of dissidents. He learned his evil trade well at the hands of the equally brutal Soviet prosecutors and judges.

Freisler himself was killed in a bombing raid not long after the 20 July plot trials when the court building was struck by a direct hit. He was found with a file in his hands about to persecute yet another victim of the "People's Court".

His victims are now commemorated in modern Germany as national heroes.

Yet there are still bigots like the "Reverend" Ray Dubuque and others who pretend that the Nazi leaders were really a "Catholic men's movement like the Knights of Columbus".

May we draw strength from the courageous stand against evil of these noble Catholic men. Consider what a singular honour it will be to spend eternity in heaven with men such as these. Are we worthy of the company of these gentle giants?

God give us the strength to learn from them and live as they did!

Christian martyrs of the old, once Catholic, Germany,
pray for us!

Maiorem hac dilectionem nemo habet ut animam suam quis ponat pro amicis suis.

Greater love than this no man hath, that he lay down his life for his friends.

John 15:13

...

The last of the Valkyrie...

Philipp, Freiherr (Baron) von Boeselager, believed to be the last surviving member of the inner circle of German Army officers who attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler with a briefcase bomb on 20 July 20 1944, died in May 2008.

He was 90.

Before he died he wrote a memoir, called Valkyrie, of the resistance within the German Army which culminated in the attempt on the life of the Nazi dictator, Adolf Hitler.

Boeselager was born into a Roman Catholic family in Burg Heimerzheim, near Bonn. After graduating from Aloysius College, a Jesuit secondary school in Bad Godesberg, he intended to study law and enter the foreign service, but not wishing to join the Nazi Party he instead enlisted in the army, as did his brother Georg, who also took part in the plot.

Boeselager was first approached in 1942 to shoot both Hitler and Heinrich Himmler at close range.

“It was no longer about saving the country, but about stopping the crimes” he said.

On 13 March 1943, with a Walther PP pistol in hand, Boeselager prepared to assassinate both men, who were scheduled to hold a strategy session with Field Marshal Günther von Kluge for whom he was then ADC, also a conspirator. When Himmler decided not to attend, von Kluge called off the mission.

In 1944, it was Boeselager’s brother Georg who gave him the signal to move forward. “One day, my brother called and said, ‘They want explosives,’ he said. “I knew exactly what for”.

Philipp von Boeselager as a Cavalry officer
during the war when he joined the plot to kill Hitler

His book is redolent with his love and admiration for his brother, Georg, who, it soon becomes quite clear, was a most extraordinary military genius of immense moral courage, integrity and inner resources.

Georg von Boeselager, Philipp's brother

Philipp supplied the bomb that Stauffenberg used. He and Georg come from another ancient German Catholic family and were, like Stauffenberg, cavalry officers, both joining the 15th Paderborn Cavalry Regiment. Georg was an astonishingly able officer, later commanding a Cavalry Brigade at the age of 29 before being killed in battle on the Eastern front. Philipp was, himself, wounded no less than 5 times, all seriously.

The army controlled the front and backward for some 200-300 kilometres but the rear area was in the hands of the Reichskommissariat, the SD and SS. It was only when there was a need for the army to liaise with the rear area to co-ordinate defence against the partisan groups that they started to come into contact with the Nazi extermination policy against Jews, gypsies and others.

This was what turned them into conspirators against the regime and Hitler's life. Boeselager describes an "encounter with the demon" in the form of SS-Obergrueppenfuehrer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski who, asked to explain what was meant by "special treatment" of the gypsies in the area, candidly stated that they were all shot.

Boeselager and his boss, the Commander of Army Group Centre, Field Marshal Gunther von Kluge, were appalled and aghast and demanded that steps be taken to arrest the culprits. The diabolical Bach-Zelewski replied that the gypsies were eliminated as "enemies of the Reich" and that such was to be the fate of all such enemies, a thinly-veiled hint directed now at von Kluge.

Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, Commander of Army Group Centre
and a co-conspirator in the anti-Hitler plot. Boeselager was his ADC.

Philipp also recounts going with von Kluge to the Fuehrerhauptquartier and seeing men of no military standing poncing about in gaudy uniforms, guzzling champagne and planning seedy night excursions with women.

He overheard Bormann refusing to send a telelgram on the 70th birthday of Archduke Joseph of Austria because Joseph had married a Catholic (of the Bavarian Royal family), Bormann clearly being too dense to realise that the Habsburgs are Catholics par excellence. Bormann even confronted Boeselager when he walked out at this comment but Boeselager stood his ground against this Nazi thug.

Had the assassination succeeded, Boeselager was supposed to lead 1,200 of his cavalrymen back to Berlin and take part in a general uprising against the Nazi regime, code-named Operation Valkyrie.

Most of the approximately 200 conspirators, including Colonel von Stauffenberg, were rounded up and executed, and many others were later accused and executed. Boeselager heard that the plot had failed and turned his cavalrymen round and got them back to the front. There was sufficient chaos at the front that he managed to get them back unnoticed and so managed to see out the war without being discovered.

Philipp von Boeselager in later life

After the war, he studied law and economics and served as an adviser in creating the Bundeswehr, the armed forces of West Germany. In 1948 he married Rosa Maria, Countess von Westphalen zu Fürstenberg. One of his daughters married a Stauffenberg.

Boeselager's book explodes many myths peddled by Lefties in the West.

As one progresses through the book one realises quickly that one is reading of men of the highest moral calibre and spiritual integrity faced with some of the most calamitously impossible moral dilemmas that men ever had to face and emerging from them morally unscathed in a way that the vast majority of men would have been unlikely to do.

Yet these are the outstandingly noble men that English Leftists like Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, Deputy Head of PWE, wrote in a minute that the SS and Gestapo were doing the Allies a "favour" in killing. He had been friends with some of the German anti-Hitler conspirators before the war but turned his coat against them when the war started. Words simply cannot readily describe the sickening hypocrisy of such a view.

Unlike the Allies, these German officers were fighting totalitarianism on 2 fronts, at home and against the Soviets. They were right to do so. Let Boeselager describe their views:

"When the fighting on the Eastern Front began, German officers felt that they represented civilisation in a battle against a barbarous nation. What is barbarism? First of all, it is complete disrespect for the rights of individuals, brutality in human relationships, savagery in the actions of everyday life, and finally indifference to all the achievements in culture and comfort, to everything that centuries of labour and the progress of the human spirit have produced that is beautiful. These communists whose agents shot down without hesitation soldiers who had retreated, these officers without consciences who, in order to exhaust German munitions, sent ragtag groups of women, old men and children gathered together in haste towards us to be mown down by our machine guns; these enemies who systematically killed the wounded, put out the eyes of prisoners, and didn't deign to bury their own dead - they all seemed barbarians to us. We had heard many stories of this kind, and we had seen many macabre proofs that they were true."

He also gives the lie to that persistent myth put about by some English liberals, bending over backward to believe Soviet propaganda, that these German officers only joined the plot at the last minute to save themselves or that they intended to keep all the territorial gains made by the Nazis and would not accept other terms.

Boeselager notes this view and comments on it saying that he wishes categorically to deny it. He then gives examples of how it is an entirely false view.

Philipp von Boeselager during the war

It is perfectly clear, to any unbiased and reasonable mind, that these men were prepared to risk death and torture to bring down the Nazi government of the Third Reich and that they had the courage of their very noble convictions.

It is an unpleasant characteristic of modern liberals that they expect the highest standards of others whilst accepting very sloppy ones for themselves. They rail against racism but then practice a most blatant form of racism against Germans who, under extreme and trying conditions, opposed the Third Reich.

Whilst evidencing not a jot of courage to stand up against the tide themselves, these liberal hypocrites claim the right to criticise some exceedingly heroic men for not "doing more" to oppose Hitler. I cannot help the feeling that there is a special place in Hell for such unworthy critics of men who risked all to save others.

Maiorem hac dilectionem nemo habet ut animam suam quis ponat pro amicis suis

"Greater love than this no man hath, that he lay down his life for his friends"

[John 15:13]

+++

Valkyrie: Stauffenberg and the sacred Germany against the profane Germany...

"Es lebt unser heiliges Deutschland!"

"Long live our sacred Germany!"

These are reputedly the last words of 37-year-old Bavarian Catholic aristocrat and cavalry officer, Colonel Claus, Count Schenk von Stauffenberg, before he was summarily shot in the courtyard of German Army Headquarters in Bendlerstrasse, Berlin, for his attempt upon the life of murderous Nazi dictator, Adolf Hitler.

Accurately, the film released yesterday in Britain, and titled Valkyrie, includes this memorable and dramatic scene, played well by American actor, Tom Cruise, as Colonel Count Stauffenberg.

The film is, in my humble view, an excellent portrayal of this true story of patriotic German officers, civilians, politicians, aristocrats and commoners alike, who opposed the Hitler regime and took courageous action to overthrow it from within, risking their lives so to do.

I have followed the Stauffenberg story for decades and got to know his son, Major-General Berthold von Stauffenberg, when he was German military attaché in London.

It is my belief that the film is an accurate portrayal, well handled and well presented. It is also a gripping story presented with all the excitement and drama that it so well deserves.

A clip from the film Valkyrie

Hollywood's homage to the men who risked - and lost - their lives in this courageous attempt is long overdue but now it has come and it will, I am sure, have a considerable impact on the way many cynical moderns view the story of Germany and its people who found themselves governed by a brutal tyranny.

Numerous famous actors play the parts of the key figures in the plot (from left standing) Carl Goerdeler, the Mayor of Leipzig, Stauffenberg, Colonel-General Ludwig Beck (who had resigned in 1938), Major-General Henning von Treskow, (seated) Colonel Albrecht Mertz von Quirnheim, Lieutenant-General Friedrich Olbricht and one other.

What was the "sacred" or "holy" Germany which Stauffenberg cried allegiance to?

Quite simply it was the holy empire which had placed Germany and Germans at the centre of a Christian, Catholic Europe for 1,000 years and which had built up, lead, governed, protected and enhanced European Christian civilisation for most of its history.

We are apt to forget this when we lump the thousands of years of German history into those very few short years when, after a period of anarchy, the political elite turned its back on the past and installed a new and diabolical ideology in place of the Christian past.

That ideology was a materialist, Socialist, racist, secular, anti-monarchist and anti-Catholic creed called National Socialism.

Goering surveys the bomb damage

As is crystal clear from his early autobiography, Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"), its devilish leader hated all that was associated with the Catholic and Habsburg empire of the past whilst he - schizophrenically and contradictorily - claimed to be restoring the ancient, thousand-year old, empire of the past, albeit in a new and "modern" guise.

The real, thousand-year old, empire of the past was, in truth, the Holy Roman Empire, a Catholic, not a Socialist, empire sometimes called Das heilige römische Reich der deutschen Völker or "The Holy Roman Empire of the German People".

This empire was begun in what later became France by the Emperor Charlemagne, a Frank, a race of people who were ancestors of both French and German people.

Later the Empire was restored to glory by the Emperor Otto the Great and gradually became centred upon what is now Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Northern Italy and parts of France, Poland, Ukraine and Hungary.

This Empire was Roman and Catholic. Its Emperor - successor to the Roman emperors of old - was the first Catholic layman of Christian Europe and recognised as such by all Christian countries and political leaders. This Empire and its rulers recognised their duty of allegiance to the Roman Pontiff as their spiritual superior.

And for this reason it was called "holy" or "sacred". It was titled Sacrum Romanum Imperium and recognised as such by all the popes who ever ruled.

This was the "sacred" or "holy" Germany to which Stauffenberg referred and which he had come to realise was - and must always be - implacably opposed to the dirty little Social Darwinist, secularist tyranny that Hitler and the National Socialists had imposed upon a once noble Germany.

Stauffenberg (left) with Colonel Albrecht, Ritter (Knight) Mertz von Quirnheim, a fellow army officer and co-conspirator in the 20 July 1944 plot against Hitler. He was shot with Stauffenberg outside Army HQ.

The decline and fall of religion in Germany, partly a by-product of the Protestant Reformation, had finally sapped all the life out of the true Germany and the vacuum had been filled with a legion of devils from Hell who inspired this new and grotesque National Socialist ideology, said to be based upon science but actually based upon the spurious findings of a entirely perverse, modern science, based upon Darwinism, among other ideas.

Many were opposed to Hitler - Social Democrats, liberals, Jews, Communists, Evangelicals, conservatives - but only one man summoned up the skill, courage, tenacity, perserverance and commanding personality to hatch a plan to deliver Germany and the world from the tyrant and, moreover, was willing to carry it out himself.

That man was Claus von Stauffenberg.

Stauffenberg with 2 of his children

He came from a noble family of a line 700 years old. That gave him a certain upbringing, education, moral formation and self-possession as well as a sense of responsibility arising from his family background.

His father was the last Oberhofmarschall of the Kingdom of Württemberg and Claus, from an early age, had had impressed upon him that his family heritage was not merely a social status but imposed a solemn duty to serve God, nation and conscience above self.

Interestingly, it was the aristocrats who really showed determination and courage to stand up to the tyrant.

Above all, however, let it not ever be forgotten what most went to make up the core beliefs of Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg and what was his source of strength, discernment and loyalty, as well as courage, and to which he turned for counsel before making his final decision to carry out his plans.

Before deciding to take part in the plot and lay the bomb, Stauffenberg went to confession.

It was his religion, first and foremost, that gave him the tools for reason, emotion and decisive action. His religion was one truly worthy of the name.

And that was because Colonel Claus, Count Schenk von Stauffenberg was a traditional Roman Catholic.

Banner of the Holy Roman Empire



...