#6: Galen Opposes T-4 Action

Clemens Augustinus Emmanuel Joseph Pius Anthonius Hubertus Marie Graf von Galen (16 March 1878 – 22 March 1946), better known as Clemens August Graf von Galen, was a German count, Bishop of Münster, and cardinal of the Catholic Church. During World War II, Galen led Catholic protests against Nazi euthanasia and denounced Gestapo lawlessness and the persecution of the Church in Nazi Germany. He was appointed a cardinal by Pope Pius XII in 1946, shortly before his death.

After serving in Berlin parishes from 1906 to 1929, he became the pastor of Münster's St. Lamberti Church, where he was noted for his political conservatism before being appointed Bishop of Münster in 1933.

Galen began to criticize Hitler's movement in 1934. He condemned the Nazi "worship of race" in a pastoral letter on 29 January 1934, and assumed responsibility for the publication of a collection of essays which fiercely criticized Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg and defended the teachings of the Catholic Church. He was an outspoken critic of certain Nazi policies and helped draft Pope Pius XI's 1937 anti-Nazi encyclical Mit brennender Sorge. In 1941, von Galen delivered three sermons in which he denounced the arrest of Jesuits, the confiscation of church property, Nazi attacks on the Church, and in the third, fiercely condemned the state-approved mass killing in the involuntary euthanasia program of persons with mental or physical defects (Aktion T4). The sermons were illegally circulated in print, inspiring some German Resistance groups, including the White Rose.

While the Nazi extermination of Jewish people took place primarily on Polish territory, the murder of people with disabilities (viewed by the Nazi regime as "invalid" individuals) became public knowledge because it took place on German soil and interfered directly in Catholic and Protestant welfare institutions. Church leaders who opposed it – chiefly Bishop Galen and Theophil Wurm, the Lutheran Bishop of Württemberg – were able to rouse widespread public opposition.

The regime initiated its euthanasia program in 1939. It targeted people with dementia, cognitive/mental disabilities, mental illness, epileptic, physical disabilities, children with Down's Syndrome and people with similar afflictions. The program systematically murdered more than 70,000 people between September 1939 and August 1941. After 1941 the killing continued unofficially, with the total number of deaths estimated at 200,000.

In 1941, with the Wehrmacht still marching on Moscow, Galen, despite his long-time nationalist sympathies, denounced the lawlessness of the Gestapo, the confiscations of church properties, and the Nazi euthanasia program. He attacked the Gestapo for converting church properties to their own purposes – including use as cinemas and brothels. He protested the mistreatment of Catholics in Germany: the arrests and imprisonment without legal process, the suppression of monasteries, and the expulsion of religious orders.

But his sermons went further than defending the church; he spoke of a moral danger to Germany from the regime's violations of basic human rights: "the right to life, to inviolability, and to freedom is an indispensable part of any moral social order", he said – and any government that punishes without court proceedings "undermines its own authority and respect for its sovereignty within the conscience of its citizens". Galen said that it was the duty of Christians to resist the taking of human life, even if it meant losing their own lives.

Hitler's order for the Aktion T4 Euthanasia Program was dated 1 September 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland. As word of the program spread, protest grew, until finally, Galen delivered his famous August 1941 sermons denouncing the program as "murder". On 3 August 1941, in one of his series of denunciations, Galen declared:

"'Thou shalt not kill.' God engraved this commandment on the souls of men long before any penal code. . . . God has engraved these commandments in our hearts. . . . They are the unchangeable and fundamental truths of our social life... Where in Germany and where, here, is obedience to the precepts of God? [. . .] As for the first commandment, 'Thou shalt not have strange gods before me,' instead of the One, True, Eternal God, men have created at the dictates of their whim, their own gods to adore: Nature, the State, the Nation, or the Race."

Galen's three powerful sermons of July and August 1941 earned him the nickname of the "Lion of Münster". The sermons were printed and distributed illegally. Hitler wanted to have Galen removed as a bishop, but Goebbels told him this would result in the loss of the loyalty of the population of Westphalia. The sermons protested against Nazi policies such as Gestapo terror, euthanasia, forced sterilization, and concentration camps. His attacks on the Nazis were so severe that Nazi official Walter Tiessler proposed in a letter to Martin Bormann that Galen should be executed.

On 13 July 1941, Galen attacked the regime for its Gestapo tactics of terror, including disappearances without trial, the closure of Catholic institutions without any stated justifications, and the resultant fear imposed on all Germans. The Gestapo, he argued, reduced even the most decent and loyal citizens to fear of ending up in a cellar prison or a concentration camp. Even though the country was at war, Galen rejected the notion that his speech undermined German solidarity or unity.

Quoting Pope Pius XII's Opus Justitiae Pax and Justitia fundamentum Regnorum, Galen noted that "Peace is the work of Justice and Justice, the basis for dominion", then attacked the Third Reich for undermining justice, the belief in justice and for reducing the German people to a state of permanent fear, even cowardice. He concluded: "As a German, as a decent citizen, I demand Justice".

In a second sermon on 20 July 1941, Galen said that all written protests against the Nazi hostilities had proved to be useless. The confiscation of religious institutions continued unabated. Members of religious orders were still being deported or jailed. He asked his listeners to be patient and to endure, and said that the German people were being destroyed not by the Allied bombing from the outside, but from negative forces within.

On 3 August 1941, Galen's third sermon described the continued desecration of Catholic churches, the closing and confiscation of convents and monasteries, and the deportation of mentally ill people to undisclosed destinations, while a notice was sent to family members stating that the person in question had died. This is murder, he exclaimed, unlawful by divine and German law, a rejection of the laws of God. He said he had forwarded his evidence to the State Attorney.

"These are people, our brothers and sisters; maybe their life is unproductive, but productivity is not a justification for killing." If that were indeed a justification for execution, he reasoned, everybody would have to be afraid to even go to a doctor for fear of what might be discovered. The social fabric would be affected. Galen then remarked that a regime which can do away with the Fifth Commandment ("Thou shalt not kill.") can destroy the other commandments as well. Galen went on to raise the question of whether permanently injured German soldiers would fall under the program as well.

Thousands of copies of the sermons were circulated throughout Germany. The resulting local protests in Germany broke the secrecy that had surrounded the euthanasia program known as Aktion T4. The local Nazi Gauleiter was furious and demanded Galen's immediate arrest. Joseph Goebbels and party pragmatists preferred to wait until the end of hostilities to avoid undermining German morale in a heavily Catholic area. A year later, the euthanasia program was still active, but the regime was conducting it in greater secrecy.

According to Robert Jay Lifton, "This powerful, populist sermon was immediately reproduced and distributed throughout Germany — indeed, it was dropped among German troops by British Royal Air Force flyers. Galen's sermon probably had a greater impact than any other one statement in consolidating anti-'euthanasia' sentiment."

Howard K. Smith called Galen "heroic", writing that the movement he represented was so widespread that the Nazi government could not arrest the bishop.

Ian Kershaw called Galen's "open attack" on the government's euthanasia programme in 1941 a "vigorous denunciation of Nazi inhumanity and barbarism".

According to Anton Gill, "Galen used his condemnation of this appalling policy to draw wider conclusions about the nature of the Nazi state."

The sermons inspired various people in the German Resistance. The Lübeck martyrs distributed von Galen's sermons. The sermons influenced the Scholl siblings in founding the White Rose pacifist student resistance group. One of von Galen's sermons of 1941 was the group's first pamphlet. Generalmajor Hans Oster, a devout Lutheran and a leading member of the German Resistance, once said of Galen:

"He's a man of courage and conviction. And what resolution in his sermons! There should be a handful of such people in all our churches, and at least two handfuls in the Wehrmacht. If there were, Germany would look quite different!"

Galen suffered virtual house arrest from 1941 until the end of the war. Documents suggest the Nazis intended to hang him at the end of the war.

In a Table Talk from 1942, Hitler said: "The fact that I remain silent in public over Church affairs is not in the least misunderstood by the sly foxes of the Catholic Church, and I am quite sure that a man like Bishop von Galen knows full well that after the war I shall extract retribution to the last farthing."

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"A direct order from Hitler to [Karl] Brandt on 24 August 1941, passed on to [Phillip] Bouhler and [Viktor] Brack, suspended the gassing of adults until further notice, though Hitler also made sure that the killing of children, which was on a much smaller and therefore much less noticeable scale, continued. [Clemens August Graf von] Galen's sermons, and the widespread public reaction it had aroused made it difficult to continue without creating even further unrest, as the Nazi leaders reluctantly conceded. . . .

"It is impossible to say with any certainty what would have happened had [Galen] not ignored the advice of his superiors in the Catholic Church and raised his voice against the killing of the mentally sick and handicapped. But given the propensity of Nazism to radicalize its policies when it met with little or no resistance to them, it is at least possible, even indeed probable, that it would have continued well beyond the original quota after August 1941. . . .

"The mentally handicapped, long-term psychiatric patients and others classified by the regime as leading a 'life unworthy of life' were simply to closely bound into the central networks of German society to be isolated and disposed of, the more so since the definitions of abnormality applied by the T-4 experts were so arbitrary and included so many people who were intelligence and active enough to know what was happening to them and tell others all about it.

"The same, however, could not be said of other persecuted groups in German society such as the Gypsies or the Jews. Galen said nothing about them, nor did the other representatives of the Churches, with rare exceptions. The lesson that Hitler learned from the whole episode was not that it was inadvisable to order the wholesale murder of large groups of people, but that, just in case a future action of this kind against another minority ran into similar trouble, it was inadvisable to put such an order down in writing.

"And the euphemistic propaganda with with Action T-4 had been surrounded, the deceptions, the reassurances to the victims and their relatives, from the description of murder as 'special treatment' to the disguising of gas chambers as showers, would be strengthened still further when it came to other, larger acts of mass murder. The involuntary euthanasia campaign had been an open secret, in which the employment of euphemisms and circumlocutions had presented people with a choice to ignore what was really going on by accepting them at face value, or to penetrate to their actual meaning, hardly a difficult or problematical enterprise, and then to be confronted with the difficult choice of whether or not to do anything about it. . . .

"The machinery of mass murder developed in the course of Action T-4, from the selection of victims to the economic exploitation of their remains, had operated with grim efficiency. Having proved itself in this context, it was now ready to be applied in others, on a far larger scale."

-- Richard J. Evans, in his book The Third Reich at War