Would the "Reverend" Ray rather slander Pius XII than save Jewish lives?

This is the face of a very ill-informed person calling himself the "Reverend" Ray Dubuque whose aim in life seems to be to slander the Catholic Church and particularly the late and saintly Pope Pius XII.

He asks what it was that Pope Pius XII saved the Jews from.

He then claims that numerous Nazi and extremist leaders in Europe were Roman Catholics, including Hitler himself.

He likens the Nazi inner circle to a Catholic men’s movement like the Knights of Columbus.

Yes, really! I am not making this up.

Let me spell it out for the "Reverend": according to Israeli diplomat and Jewish Rabbi, Dr Pinchas a Lapide, Pope Pius XII saved 860,000 Jews from the Nazi Death camps.

Let me repeat: 860,000 Jewish lives saved.

From a horrible death in the Nazi death camps.

Is that clear enough, now?

And Lapide says that this Pope did far and away more than all other agencies put together during World War II to save Jews.

That’s the Roman Catholic Pope saving all those Jewish lives – according to a Jewish Rabbi and Diplomat.

The Roman Catholic called Pope Pius XII.

Pope Pius XII - saviour of 860,000 Jews according to Jewish Diplomat and historian, Pinchas a Lapide.

I repeat.

Roman Catholic.

Pope.

Pius XII.

Saved 860,000 Jews from death.

Got that now, sir?

And I suspect that is rather more Jewish lives saved than ever the “Reverend” Mr Ray Dubuque saved!

And for this monumental act of humanity, the "Reverend" slanders this pope in the most vile, malignant and bigoted way imaginable by pretending he was a Nazi sympathiser and collaborator.

Yes, really! That is the extent of the Christian "charity" of this "Reverend" gentleman!

I doubt that the mendacious Mr Dubuque has ever even come close to being forced to live under a totalitarian regime. I suspect that he is pontificating, condemning and slandering the Pope from the complacent comfort of his armchair.

He clearly has no idea what an apostate is. It means one who has fallen away from the faith in which he was raised or chose.

Every one of the Nazis who was raised Catholic was an apostate and, in order to rise in the Nazi Party, openly repudiated their Catholicism in favour of the new "German" religion of the racist, Nazi state.

In short, they broke with the Roman Catholic Church utterly.

The 16th century Protestants also broke with the Roman Catholic Church but by the twisted illogicality of the “Reverend” he would also have to describe as “Roman Catholics” the following:

Martin Luther
John Calvin
John Wycliffe
Peter Waldo
Jan Hus
Huldrych Zwingli
Heinrich Bullinger
John Knox
Philipp Melancthon
Michael Servetus
Balthasar Hubmaier
King Henry VIII of England
Queen Elizabeth I of England

and everyone of the founders of Protestantism since they were all born, baptised and brought up Roman Catholics! Indeed, he would have to call half of them Roman Catholic clergy because that is what men like Luther, Calvin, Melancthon, Zwingli and Knox originally were!

Yes, folks! They were all Roman Catholic clerics. The very founders of the religion the “Reverend” Mr Dubuque claims to follow were nearly all Roman Catholic clergy.

Martin Luther in the garb of a Roman Catholic priest of the 16th Century. He repudiated the Catholic Church and started the Protestant Revolt. In later life, he published violently anti-Semitic works which, later still, were quoted, approvingly, by the Nazis. Most Protestants, however, now repudiate Luther's anti-Semitism.

But, by his own reasoning (if one can call it that), the "Reverend" would also have to describe the following Nazis as Protestants since that was the faith in which they were brought up:

Gunter d'Alquen – Chief Editor of the SS official newspaper, Das Schwarze Korps ("The Black Corps"), and commander of the SS-Standarte Kurt Eggers.

Ludolf von Alvensleben – SS-Gruppenfuehrer and Major-General of police in Crimea, commander of the Selbstschutz (self-defence) of the Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia and responsible for the mass murder of thousands of Roman Catholic Poles and Jews.

Max Amann – SS-Obergruppenfuehrer and Head of Nazi publishing house Eher-Verlag and later convicted as one of the leading guilty men.

Heinz Auerswald – Nazi Commissioner for the Jewish residential district in Warsaw from April 1941 to November 1942.

Hans Aumeier - Deputy Commandant at Auschwitz and mass-murderer who was later hanged.

Artur Axmann - Chief of the Social Office of the Reich Youth Leadership. Responsible for organization and activities of the Hitler Youth.

Herbert Backe - Minister of Food (appointed 1942) and Minister of Agriculture (appointed 1943) and responsible for the “Hunger Plan” to starve tens of millions of Slavs in order to ensure steady supplies to the German people and troops. He later hanged himself in his prison cell.

Richard Baer - Commander of the Auschwitz I concentration camp from May 1944 to February 1945.

Alfred Baeumler - Philosopher who interpreted the works of Friedrich Nietzsche in order to legitimize Nazism.

Gottlob Berger - Chief of Staff for military SS and head of the SS's main leadership office and responsible for the forced death marches of POWs.

Werner Best - Civilian administrator of Nazi occupied France and Denmark.

Hans Biebow - Chief of Administration of the Łódź Ghetto.

Paul Blobel - SS commander primarily responsible for the Babi Yar massacre at Kiev.

Werner von Blomberg - Generalfeldmarshall of the German army between 1936 and 1938 and one of Hitler’s most devoted followers.

Hans-Friedrich Blunck - Propagandist and head of the Reich Literature Chamber between 1933 and 1935.

Ernst Wilhelm Bohle - leader of the Foreign Organization of the German Nazi Party from 1933 until 1945.

Martin Bormann - Head of the Party Chancellery (Parteikanzlei) and private secretary to Adolf Hitler.

Viktor Brack - Organiser of the Euthanasia Programme, Operation T4 and one of the men responsible for the gassing of Jews in the extermination camps.

Otto Bradfisch - Commander of the Security Police in Łódź and Potsdam.

Karl Brandt - Personal physician of Adolf Hitler in August 1944 and head of the administration of the Nazi T-4 euthanasia program from 1939. Convicted at Nuremberg and hanged as one of the many Nazi doctors convicted in the “Doctors’ trial”.

Walther von Brauchitsch - Commander of the German Army during the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Walter Buch - Jurist and supreme magistrate of the Nazi party. He committed suicide after arrest.

Werner Catel - Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Leipzig, considered an expert on the programme of euthanasia for children and participated in the T-4 Program which was later exported to the East for the murder of Jews.

Carl Clauberg - Doctor who conducted medical experiments on human beings in Nazi concentration camps during World War II.

Kurt Daluege - Responsible for the personal protection of Hitler and other party leaders. Also commanded the Ordnungspolizei throughout World War II and served as the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia following the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. Hanged for war crimes.

Richard Walther Darré - Minister of Food and Agriculture from 1933 to 1942 and Nazi ideologist.

Otto Dietrich - Press Chief of the Third Reich. Later convicted of crimes against humanity.

Irmfried Eberl - Commandant of Treblinka, July to September 1942. Physician and mass-murderer who hanged himself after arrest.

Dietrich Eckart - Important early member of the National-Socialist German Workers' Party and a participant of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. Introduced Rosenberg to Hitler.

Theodor Eicke - Leading figure in the establishment of concentration camps.

Richard Euringer - Writer who selected 18,000 "unsuitable" books which did not conform to Nazi ideology and were publicly burned.

Roland Freisler - Becoming a fanatical Communist, he later did a "flip" and joined the Nazi Party becoming State Secretary of Adolf Hitler's Reich Ministry of Justice and President of the Volksgerichtshof where he brutally presided over the show trials of anti-Nazis, ranting and tormenting them before ordering them to be brutally executed.

Wilhelm Frick - Minister without Portfolio until August 1943, later appointed to the ceremonial post of Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. He formulated the Enabling Act, the Nuremberg Laws and controlled numerous concentration camps. He was hanged in 1946.

Hans Fritzsche - Senior official at the Ministry for Propaganda.

Walther Funk - Minister for Economic Affairs from 1937 to 1945. Tried at Nuremberg.

Karl Gebhardt - Personal physician of Heinrich Himmler and one of the main perpetrators of surgical experiments performed on inmates of the concentration camps at Ravensbrück and Auschwitz. Convicted at the Nuremberg "Doctors' trial" and hanged.

Achim Gercke - Expert of racial matters at the Ministry of the Interior. Devised the system of "racial prophylaxis" forbidding the intermarriage between Jews and Aryans.

Hermann Göring - Second in Command of the Third Reich and commander of the Luftwaffe. Convicted at Nuremberg but committed suicide.

Arthur Greiser - Chief of Civil Administration and Gauleiter in the military district of Greater Poland. A brutal and ardent Nazi, racist and "ethnic cleanser", he was convicted after the war and hanged.

Walter Groß - Head of the Racial Policy office ardent racist and contributor to the "Final Solution" i.e. the extermination of European Jewry.

Kurt Gruber - First chairman of the Hitler Youth (1926-1931) and Nazi Gauleiter.

Karl Hanke - Governor and Gauleiter of Lower Silesia from 1940 to 1945.

Fritz Hartjenstein - Concentration camp commandant at Birkenau, Natzweiler and Flossenbürg. Sentenced to death after the war.

Paul Hausser - Prominent leader of the Waffen-SS and lieutenant-general.

August Heißmeyer - SS-Gruppenfuehrer and in charge of numerous concentration camps.

Rudolf Hess - Hitler's deputy and an ardent Nazi.

Werner Heyde - Psychiatrist and one of the main organizers of the T-4 Euthanasia Program that was the model used later for the extermination of European Jews. Committed suicide before the start of his trial in 1964.

August Hirt - Chairman at the Reich University in Strasbourg during World War II and had victims gassed so that he could experiment on them.

Karl Jäger - SD-Einsatzkommando leader and SS member whose "Jäger Report" detailing his responsibility for organising the mass murder of the Jews in Lithuania between July and December 1941 became a by-word for Nazi atrocity.

Friedrich Jeckeln - Leader of one of the largest collection of Einsatzgruppen and personally responsible for ordering the deaths of over 100,000 Jews, Slavs, Roma, and other "undesirables".

Alfred Jodl - Chief of the Operations Staff of the Armed Forces High Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or OKW) during World War II, acting as deputy to Wilhelm Keitel. Convicted at Nuremberg and hanged.

Hans Jüttner - Head of the SS Main Leadership Office and also an SS-Obergruppenführer.

Emil Kaschub - Doctor who conducted experiments on Nazi concentration camp prisoners.

Karl Kaufmann - Founding member of the Nazi party and Gauleiter of Hamburg.

Wilhelm Keitel - Field marshal (Generalfeldmarschall) and senior military leader during World War II. Convicted at Nuremberg and hanged.

Hanns Kerrl - Reichsminister of Church Affairs for the Third Reich who tried to marry the ideas of Protestant Christianity and Nazism.

Helmut Knochen - Senior commander of the Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police) in Paris during the Nazi occupation of France. Sentenced to death after the war.

Erich Koch - Gauleiter of the NSDAP in East Prussia from 1928 until 1945, and Reichskomissar in Ukraine from 1941 until 1944.

Ilse Koch - Wife of Karl Otto Koch and an overseer at Buchenwald. Infamous for her sadistic cruelty, for using the skin from murdered prisoners as souvenirs and keeping shrunken heads on her dinner table. She was dubbed "the Witch of Buchenwald". Committed suicide in prison.

Karl Otto Koch - Commandant of the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald (from 1937 to 1941), and later at Lublin (Majdanek camp). Married to Ilse Koch.

Bernhard Krüger - Leader of the VI F 4a Unit in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt responsible for, among other things, falsifying passports and documents.

Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach - Ran the Friedrich Krupp AG heavy industry conglomerate from 1909 until 1941 and was financier of the Nazi party.

Herbert Lange - SS officer and commandant of Chełmno extermination camp, where he was implicated in thousands of gassings. Also led the execution of 1,558 mental patients at the Soldau concentration camp.

Robert Ley - Head of the German Labour Front from 1933 to 1945. Sentenced to death but committed suicide.

Arthur Liebehenschel - Commandant of Auschwitz and Majdanek death camps during World War II.

Wilhelm Loeper - Gauleiter in the Gau of Magdeburg-Anhalt.

Hinrich Lohse - Gauleiter for Schleswig-Holstein and Reich Commissar for the Ostland.

Werner Lorenz - Waffen-SS general and a leader of the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, an organization charged with settling ethnic Germans in the Reich from other parts of Europe.

Hanns Ludin - SA-Obergruppenfuehrer, diplomat and ambassador to Slovakia implicated in slave-labour deportations. Executed after the war.

Martin Luther - advisor to Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, and participant in the infamous Wannsee Conference on the "Final Solution" i.e. extermination of Jews.

Viktor Lutze - SA officer and important participant in the "Night of the Long Knives".

Alfred Meyer - Deputy Reichsminister in the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories.

Kurt Meyer - Waffen-SS officer noted for his command of various tank and artillery divisions but convicted of war crimes in shooting prisoners.

Wilhelm Mohnke - Founder member of the SS-Staff Guard and one of Hitler's last remaining SS-generals.

Hermann Muhs - SS-Oberfuehrer and Minister responsible for church and religious affairs.

Konstantin Freiherr von Neurath - Foreign Minister of Germany (1932-1938) and Reichsprotektor (Governor) of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (1939-1941). Convicted at Nuremberg.

Otto Ohlendorf - SS-Gruppenführer and head of the interior division of the SD. Sentenced to death for crimes against humanity and hanged.

Joachim Peiper - Senior Waffen-SS officer and personal adjutant to Heinrich Himmler from April 1938 to August 1941. Convicted in the Malmedy massacre trial.

Paul Pleiger - State adviser and Reich Commissioner for the Economy of the East which included the use of forced slave labour.

Oswald Pohl - Organizer and administrator of concentration camps.

Erich Priebke - Participant in the Ardeatine massacre in Rome on 24 March 1944.

Hans-Adolf Prützmann - Superior SS and Police Leader, and an SS-Obergruppenführer, who participated in the Holocaust in the Baltic States.

Joachim von Ribbentrop - Foreign Minister of Germany from 1938-1945. Convicted at Nuremberg and hanged.

Leni Riefenstahl - Film director, dancer and actress and documentary propagandist for the Nazi Party and favourite of Hitler.

Alfred Rosenberg - chief ideologist of the Nazi Party and a committed racist advocate of mass-murder. Convicted at Nuremberg and hanged.

Erwin Rösener - SS-Obergruppenführer, Higher SS and Police Leader, Commander SS Upper Division Alpenland (1941-1945) convicted at Nuremberg for ordering the execution of prisoners of war.

Ernst Rudin - pyschiatrist, social Darwinist, racist and one of the fathers of the Nazi race doctrines.

Baldur von Schirach - Nazi youth leader later convicted of being a war criminal. Schirach was the head of the Hitler-Jugend (HJ, Hitler Youth) and Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter ("Reich Governor") of Vienna.

Franz Schlegelberger - State Secretary in the German Reich Ministry of Justice (RMJ) and served a while as Justice Minister during the Third Reich. He was the highest-ranking defendant at the Nuremberg Judges' Trial.

Albert Speer - architect, author and high-ranking Nazi German government official, sometimes called "the first architect of the Third Reich".

Jürgen Stroop - SS and police general who oversaw the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto during the Nazi occupation of Poland in World War II. After the war, he was convicted of war crimes and hanged.

Josef Terboven - Nazi leader, best known as the Reichskommissar (commissioner) during the German military occupation of Norway.

Fritz Todt - engineer and senior Nazi figure, the founder of Organisation Todt for forced labour.

Horst Wessel - posthumous hero of the Nazi movement following his violent death in 1930. He was the author of the lyrics to the song "Die Fahne hoch" ("The Flag on High"), usually known as Horst-Wessel-Lied ("the Horst Wessel Song"), which became the Nazi Party anthem, and which was also part of Germany's national anthem from 1933 to 1945.

Christian Wirth - senior SS officer during the program to exterminate the Jewish people of occupied Poland during the Second World War, known as Aktion Reinhard. He was a top aide of Odilo Globocnik, the overall director of Operation Reinhard, and his responsibility was scaling up the T-4 Euthanasia Program, in which disabled people were murdered by gassing or lethal injection, to the development of extermination camps for mass murder.

Karl Wolff - high-ranking member of the Nazi SS. He held the rank of SS-Obergruppenführer and General of the Waffen-SS and was convicted of deporting 300,000 Jews to Treblinka death camp.

Adolf Ziegler - tasked by the Nazi party to oversee the purging of Degenerate art by artists such as Franz Marc and Emil Nolde. He was the favoured painter of Hitler.


...and that is just a few of them!

Famously, it was a Protestant who agreed to be appointed by Hitler the Reich Bishop of the Nazi Reich, namely Ludwig Muller. You can see a picture of him in the previous post giving the Nazi salute.

The Roman Catholic Church, on the other hand, always opposed Hitler and the Nazis and some were brave enough openly to preach against him, like Bishop Count Clemens August von Galen, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Munster.

Count Clemens August von Galen, Bishop of Munster. He was called "the Lion of Munster" because of his outspoken criticism of the Nazi euthanasia policy. He knew that the Nazis would find it hard to arrest someone from so famous a family. Even so, his life was in constant danger.

Other priests were not so lucky. Many hundreds were arrested and sent to Dachau or executed like the Jesuits of Munich such as Fr Alfred Delp SJ.

Rev Alfred Delp SJ before the Nazi People's Court presided over by Protestant-born but Communist-turned-Nazi, Dr Roland Freisler, who sentenced Delp and other Catholic priests to a brutal death for daring to criticise Nazi brutality and murder of Jews.

The lesson that the unfortunate "Reverend" needs to learn is that it is in the interest of society that men remain true to historic Christianity and not abandon it for odious and murderous heathen creeds like Nazism.

The full absurdity of the views of the "Reverend" are revealed when one realises that he was, himself, raised a Roman Catholic so that, by his own classification, he is still one!

But is the "Reverend" listening?

Is he even thinking?

Over to you "Reverend"!

Those wanting to know more about the "Reverend" might care to try this:

http://www.patrioticthunder.com/whackjoboftheweek22.html

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Hitler's Protestants

National Bishop Friedrich Coch is pictured here giving a Hitler salute greeting in Dresden, 10 December 1933.

Dresden pastor Friedrich Coch was one of the leading men of the “German Christians” in Saxony.

The Nazi Party Gau consultant for church matters since 1932, he was elected to the office of state bishop by the “Brown Synod” of the German Protestant churches in August 1933. Most German Protestants either actively supported Hitler and the Nazis or else kept quiet. In stark contrast to the Roman Catholic Church, almost none made any protest about the Nazi holocaust against the Jews.

Nevertheless, many today claim the right to attack the Catholic Church for not doing enough and especially Pope Pius XII, despite the fact that he saved over 800,000 Jewish lives, more than all other agencies put together.

Such is the hypocrisy of many modern commentators that they have no desire even to find out the true facts about this issue.

When Hitler decided to create a national bishop for the Protestant confessions, the reaction of German Protestant church leaders was positively ecstatic, witness this message:

“Through God's intercession, our beloved German Fatherland has experienced a mighty exaltation. In this turning point in history we hear, as faithful evangelical Christians, the call of God to a closing of ranks and a return, the call also for a single German Evangelical Church .... The Confessions are its unalterable basis .... A national bishop of the Lutheran confession stands at its head .... Christ comes again and brings an eternal completion in the majesty of His Kingdom”.
[Zabel, James A., Nazism and the Pastors: A Study of the Ideas of Three Deutsche Christen Groups. Missoula, Mont. 1976. P.28]

In this, the Protestants saw the hand of God at work in Germany. He was calling the churches back to their old place and task in the midst of the nation.

The Fuehrer was popular among Protestants and it was in traditionally Protestant areas that he had secure his largest vote in contradistinction to the Roman Catholic areas, where he secured his lowest vote (save Berlin where Socialists kept the Nazi vote down).

Reich Bishop of the Protestant churches, Ludwig Mueller, at a Nazi rally

Provincial churches united and synod after synod voiced its approval of a national church under one bishop. Dissent was virtually non-existent.

There was no excuse for this mass approval of Nazism by the German Protestants. It was a grotesque national and international betrayal of the principles of Christ. They were fully aware of Hitler's ideology and aims: he had revealed much of them in his autobiography Mein Kampf, published in the twenties.

Long before January 1933, when Hitler became chancellor, Protestant groups had become widespread in Germany which attempted to combine Christianity with the type of paganism that the Nazis espoused. In 1932, that is, before Hitler became chancellor, a number of these groups had united in what came to be known as the movement of the "German Christians" (Deutsche Christen).

Presidium of the German Christian movement in December 1933

This movement espoused the Nazi party's "positive Christianity" - devised by the odious Nazi ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg - stressing nationalism and the state.

It was especially these "German Christians" who pushed for a national church under one bishop and one Fuehrer. Once Hitler consolidated his power in the course of 1933, their influence grew tremendously. They had members in every provincial church-governing body and were openly supported by members of the Nazi party, many of whom now joined this Protestant national church.

Reich Bishop Ludwig Mueller,
wearing the "NSDAP-Hoheitsabzeichen" (Nazi Eagle party badge) and Feldschnalle (ribbons).

Hitler appointed Ludwig Mueller as bishop. In November 1933 a meeting of 20,000 "German Christians" took place in the Sports Palace, Berlin. The meeting opened with Luther's "A Mighty Fortress” and speeches as well as resolutions were outspoken in their anti-Semitism. The Jewish elements of Christianity must be discarded; the "Rabbi Paul" was to be rejected; the Bible was to be purged of all Jewish influences. Only one person out of the 20,000 cast a negative vote.

Many from the German “Christian” movement went on to become Hitler’s willing tools in the oppression of subject nations and the extermination of Jews.

Investiture of Ludwig Mueller as Reich bishop

So outspokenly pro-Nazi were these German “Christians” that the Nazi Party had to disavow them publicly for fear of a reaction. Even Bishop Mueller disavowed them.

Toward the end of December Bishop Mueller signed an agreement with Baldur von Shirach, the Hitler Youth leader, whereby some 700,000 members of the Evangelical Youth Organization were transferred to the Hitler Youth.

Mass meeting of the "German Christian" movement in 1933 to support Hitler and the Nazis. The banner reads "The German Christian reads the 'Gospel in the Third Reich' ".

Where were the protests from German Protestants at Nazism and Hitler?

There were very, very few. Martin Niemoller, and then later Dietrich Boenhoeffer and Karl Barth (who was, in fact, Swiss, not German) are among the few names that come down to us. Later – much later – there was the Kreisau circle which numbered a few aristocratic Protestants as well as Catholics and those without any specific faith.

And that was about it!

Even then, Niemoeller’s "Pastors' Emergency League" avoided any confrontation with the state, and the exclusion of Aryans was only rejected "in the area of the Church of Christ" and not in the state or society at large!

Moreover, Niemoller was a Hitler supporter to start, despite what the Nazi leader had written in Mein Kampf.

Martin Niemoller never challenged the Jewish holocaust.

Niemoller wrote:

"I really believed...that Jews should avoid aspiring to Government positions or seats in the Reichstag. There were many Jews, especially among the Zionists, who took a similar stand. Hitler's assurance satisfied me at the time. On the other hand, I hated the growing atheistic movement, which was fostered and promoted by the Social Democrats and the Communists. Their hostility toward the Church made me pin my hopes on Hitler for a while".

Niemoller was later imprisoned but survived the war and became a pacifist peacenik - too little, too late and even then, wrong-headed. Pacifism is not the answer but early opposition to evil - fighting it, if necessary.

Hans and Sophie Scholl of the "White Rose" movement did so. They were originally Protestant Christians but, unlike the vast majority, they fought the evil - and were guillotined by the Gestapo, true martyrs.

Inge Scholl, the sister of Hans and Sophie, became a Roman Catholic and she, and other authors, say that Hans and Sophie died as Catholics (see: Schüler, Barbara. "Im Geiste der Gemordeten...": Die 'Weiße Rose' und ihre Wirkung in der Nachkriegszeit. Paderborn, Germany: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2000).

Niemoller never protested the deportation and murder of the Jews.

Hans and Sophie Scholl, with Christoph Probst.
These young people, with outstanding courage, defied the Nazis and were executed by guillotine.

Few pastors joined the League – another indication of the pro-Nazi stance in the Protestant churches. Even so, loyalty toward the regime was carefully observed by the League. When in October 1933 Hitler ended Germany's membership of the League of Nations, everyone cheered, including the Pastors' Emergency League, which sent a congratulatory message to the Fuehrer assuring him of the members' support!

The Barmen Declaration which had been written by Karl Barth and two Lutheran theologians, which represented but a tiny minority, and was the idea of Karl Barth, a Swiss not a German, was not a political manifesto and it avoided political issues, Nazism was not expressly rejected and Hitler's crimes were not mentioned.

Not a word was said, for example, about the Jews.

This was a terrible omission in many of the pre-Barmen declarations as well as in Barmen itself.

Karl Barth authored the "Barmen Declaration" but never protested the Jewish holocaust.

The Jewish question does not seem to have interested Barth overmuch. Much later, he himself admitted that. In a letter written in May 1967 to Bonhoeffer's biographer, he stated:

“I myself have long felt guilty that I did not make this problem [the Jewish question] central, at least in public, in the two Barmen declarations of 1934 which I composed. In 1934, certainly, a text in which I said a word to that effect would not have found general agreement either in the Reformed Synod of January 1934 or in the General Synod of May at Barmen - if one considers the state of mind of the confessors of faith in those days. But that I was caught up in my own affairs somewhere else is no excuse for my not having properly fought for this cause."
[E. Bethge, "Troubled Self-Interpretation . . . " in The German Church Struggle and the Holocaust. P.67.]

Indeed, the Protestant churches in Germany simply ignored or avoided the Jewish question.

The Barmen authors were only concerned to preserve the purity of the church's doctrine. The vast majority of the Protestant clergy constantly hampered the efforts of anyone who tried to rouse them to resist the evils of the regime.

The stubborn Lutheran tradition of obedience to the ruling powers ensured that German Protestants willingly collaborated with the evil Nazi regime and formed a very significant section of the nation that helped carry out Hitler’s evil plans.

After the war, in October 1945, the Stuttgart Manifesto was published wherein the German Protestant churches were forced to express their guilty collaboration with the Nazi regime:

"With great pain we say: through us, infinite suffering has been brought upon many peoples and countries."

Shame, shame, shame upon those Protestants who now attack the Catholic Church and, in particular, Pope Pius XII, who saved over 800,000 Jewish lives, in stark contrast to the Protestant leaders who, instead, actively collaborated with the diabolically evil, pagan and murderous Nazi regime.

Shame!

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