Reply #40: ... Charges Raised against Galen as a Result

[struggle4progress]

Division Chief — Propaganda
Berlin, 12 August 1941
To the Reich Minister for Propaganda and Popular Enlightenment
Concerning: Catholic Action

At the end of July and the beginning of August several meetings of a rather select committee of the Bishops' Conference of Fulda took place. It was decided at those meetings to continue the line of increasingly sharp opposition. The execution of those decisions becomes evident in three pastoral letters of the Bishop Count von Galen of Muenster. In the pastoral letters of 13 and 20 July the bishop attacked the Gestapo with harsh words because of the closing of several Jesuit houses and convents of the Mission Sisters of the Immaculate Conception; he calls the officials of the Gestapo thieves and robbers. Then he connects those confiscations with several bombings of the city of Muenster and calls them just punishment from heaven for the misdeeds of the Gestapo. In these pastoral letters he glorifies Pastor Niemoeller and attempts to disprove the charge of disturbing the unity of the people by claiming that it is only the Gestapo which is destroying the unity of the people.

After such attacks against official organs of the state, stronger in form and tenor than the earlier mentioned, more hidden accusations, the Bishop of Muenster on 3 August in a sermon to his diocesans came out with the most severe attack against the leadership of the German government ever made during the past decades. After first dealing again with the closing of those religious houses and convents he turns against the execution of measures concerning Euthanasia for incurable cases of feeblemindedness ...

I personally retain the viewpoint that, if the Fuehrer should agree with my proposal to hang the bishop, we could safely still continue along the lines used so far. However, should the Fuehrer reject this proposal and postpone a reckoning, and defer action in the present case also, until after the war, I herewith request that it be considered whether Dr. Goebbels should not try, as far as might be possible, to pursue the course he suggested.

Tiessler

http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=1572