I’ve seen many monuments and tributes to victims of the Nazi Holocaust in my life. They all mention certain groups among the victims including Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and the physically and mentally handicapped. A few also mention less popular groups such as communists, sex criminals, and Russian POWs. However there’s one group of victims that I’ve never seen mentioned, and in fact I didn’t even know that these people were among the victims. I refer to people who professed Christian faith and were killed by the Nazis as a result. There are at least three groups that I know of.
The Polish Clergy. After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the extermination of the Catholic clergy in Poland was on the first German policies put into place. Between two and three thousand were sent to concentration camps, while most of the rest were put into forced labor gangs for the durations of the war. Here’s an interview with one of the survivors.
German clergy who protested. About one third of the clergy in Germany banded together in 1934 to form an organization called “The Confessing Church”, dedicated to opposing Nazi policy. During the war years, some of these were sent to the gas chambers. More frequently, they were drafted into the army and sent to near-certain death on the Russian front.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses. Hitler marked this group for extermination, and over ten thousand were sent to the concentration camps. Here’s the history.
Now that I’ve learned of these facts, I’m puzzled as to why there’s so little recognition of these victims.
Oh, it’s because the mainstream media hates Christians.
That is what you’re getting at right? Or is this to buttress up your assertion that Hitler wasn’t a Christian?
Or it could be that they are small numbers (except for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who I *had *heard about before) compared to the jews, gypsies and handicapped.
It’s becuase the German and Polish clergy were not holoaust victims by any defintion or usage I’ve ever seen.
The most obvious difference for the German and Polish clergy is that they were “interned” because of their specifcally anti-Nazi actions. These people set out to deliberately and specifcally oppose the national war effort and endorsed direct opposition ranging from civil disobedience to outright terrorism. While the degree was different this is no different to the reaction to dissidents, seditionists etc. in the US, England or other Allied nations.
That is not to say that history hasn’t vindicated their opposition or that it makes them less heroic for doing so, but it puts them into a completely different category to the Jews and JWs. They are far more similar to the various resistance movements who are also not regularly included in holocaust figures. “The Holocaust” has a specific meaning, and where it is used to encompass gentiles at all it refers to people killed by the Nazis for simply engaging in their normal lifestyle. It never encompasses people who took a deliberate and novel role in actively opposing the Nazis.
The JWs certainly could be included under the holocaust umbrella, since they did nothing in the Nazi era that they weren’t also doing before and after that era. IOW they were killed because their normal and essentially harmless activities were viewed with distaste by the Nazis. While this is comparable to the Jewish or homosexual experience it is completely dissimilar to the actions of individual priests of religions that had absolutely no history of pacifism/opposition to totalitarianism and who were acting without organisational approval.
IOW"The Holocaust" doesn’t normally refer to individuals punished for actively opposing the Nazis, rather it refrers to groups whose members were persecuted for simply belonging to a group. So while the Jews, Homosexuals, Gypsies and JWs were holocaust victims, the minority of mainstream Christian clergy killed were not. Those clergy were active resisters, not holocaust victims. And there is a world of difference between a regime killing people who are actively seeking to destroy it and a regime killing people simply for being a member of a group with no particualr opinion on that regime one or the other.
And as Lobohan points out, most people with even a passing interest in the holocaust are well aware that it included Gypsies, JWs and homsexuals as well as Jews. Just as most people who have any interest in the resistance to the Nazis are well aware of the role played by the Christian clergy.
This may be true of the German clergy but it’s not true of the Polish clergy. The Nazis targeted the Polish clergy as a group on the assumption that they would form a leadership in Polish resistance. So anyone who was a Polish clergymember was arrested regardless of their individual actions or opinions.
The same was true of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Like the Jews they were subject to arrest just because of their religion with no further reason needed.
One other forgotten group of victims were black Germans. Germany had a fairly small black population but they were one of the first groups targetted. They were vulnerable because of their visibility and their relative isolation in German culture.
Ahh, I didn’t realise that. Still, it seems they were targetted because of a fear that they were a potential internal threat, much as Japanese Americans or German Australians were targetted in their countries. So it’s still quite different to the standard holocaust
But they weren’t being arrested because of their religion were they? They were being arrested because of their positionof social leadership, yes? Polish laymen of exactly the same religion were never arrested were they?
The Confessing Church is certainly well known in Germany, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer is greatly revered for his open opposition to the Nazi regime (however, I’m somewhat curious as to where you get the one third from; this wiki article makes it seem like more of one sixth, with an equal number adhering to the pro-Nazi German Christians).
I don’t think any German schoolchild is ignorant of any of the other cases you cite, either, so if there is any ignorance regarding them, it is most likely due to the simple fact that their numbers easily are overwhelmed by those of the ‘better known’ holocaust victims.
The Nazis claimed that Jews were a potential internal threat and used that as justification to kill them. How is it any different when they said the same thing and took the same same actions against another group?
In my opinion, the important point is that people were killed because they belonged to a designated group rather than because of anything they did as an individual.
I think you missed a line. I wrote: “The same was true of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Like the Jews they were subject to arrest just because of their religion with no further reason needed.”
The Jews were not subject to arrest, persecution and death because of their religion. Religion was not a part of this. The Nazi laws towards Jews were based on ethnic ancestry. That means that Jews who had converted to Christianity, and even the baptized children of Jews who had converted to Christianity, could still be arrested if their background was found out.
Nazism was not about Christians vs. Jews. It was about the Nazis vs. anyone the Nazis didn’t like. They came up with all kinds of bizarre justifications for their “racial” laws. The Nazis were just peachy with the Japanese, referring to them as “honorary Aryans.” They felt the same way about the Arabs, because the Arabs were trying to exterminate the Jews in what was then known as Palestine - Hitler and the Nazis were quite close with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and other Arab leaders despite the Arabs being Semites and therefore of the same racial makeup of the Jews. The Nazis also thought the Slavs were subhuman but they were more than happy to give a pass to Ukrainians who were willing to cooperate with the Nazis and form SS units.
Missed the edit window.
Although Snopes had not addressed the e-mail at the time I posted the original thread, they have since. Note that the Snopes link discusses the anti-Muslim aspect of the e-mail and, to my chagrin, does not directly address the issue of whether there was Christian-specific or “incidental” Christian persecution by Nazis.
The persecution and murder of the Jehovah’s Witnesses certainly isn’t ignored by the Washington, DC Holocaust Museum, at least. Here’s a link to a day long program they held in October of 2006, honoring the Jehovah’s Witnesses who were imprisoned and murdered by the Nazis (and the page contains links to other pages on the site dealing with persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses by the Nazi regime:
Tim Snyder has an article in last month’s New York Review of Books covering unknown aspects of the Holocaust. The big picture is this. In Nazi ideology all “Slavic” people were racially inferior. The definition of Slavic was vague, as was much of Nazi ideology, but it certainly included all of Poland. The Nazi gameplan called for the eventual extermination of all Slavic people, so that their land could become repopulated by Germans. This plan was supposed to go into effect in the winter of 1942, after the defeat of the Soviet Union. It never happened because the Soviet Union was never defeated.
However, the Nazis did implement some pieces of that master plan. The extermination of the clergy in Poland, along with political leaders, was a first stage of that plan.
As for the role that Catholic religion played, I’m not certain whether Hitler or other Nazi leaders ever explicitly cited it to justify their actions in Poland. What’s certain is that advocates of eugenics all over the world believed that Catholic faith was an indicator of racial inferiority, and this belief contributed to the intellectual climate that Nazism grew from.
The Nazis didn’t have a racial basis for their dislike of Catholicism. Remember, Nazism was strongest in Southern, Catholic Germany (and Hitler came from a Catholic family himself). The “advocates of eugenics” you mentioned that “believed that Catholic faith was an indicator of racial inferiority”, weren’t from all over the world, but from the US, Britain, and Scandinavia, where the eugenics movements were strongest, and those countries had a long history of religious opposition to Catholicism and anti-Catholic bias.
To the extent that the Nazis were anti-Catholic, and they were, it was, first, because of their dislike of Christianity in general, and second, because Catholicism taught that the pope, who the Nazis couldn’t control, was the source of moral correctness, and the Nazis, like totalitarians everywhere, weren’t fond of dual loyalties.