“The bishops of the diocese of Germany, in their dutiful solicitude to keep the Catholic faith pure and to protect the inviolable aims and rights of the Catholic Church, have adopted, for weighty reasons during the last years, an attitude of opposition toward the National Socialist movement, through prohibitions and warnings, which were to remain in effect as long and as far as those reasons remained valid.
“It should now be recognized that there are public and solemn declarations issued by the highest representative of the Reich Government—who at the same time is the authoritarian leader of that movement—which acknowledge the inviolability of the teachings of the Catholic faith and the unswerving mission and rights of the Church and which expressly guarantee the full validity of the legal pacts concluded between the several German Länder and the Church.
“Without lifting the condemnation, implied in our previous measures, of certain religious and ethical errors, the Episcopate now believes it can be confident that those general prohibitions and warnings prescribed need no longer be regarded as necessary.”
The Catholic Center Party, yielding to these assurances and to pressure, was dissolved on July 5, 1933. I refer to Document Number 2403-PS, already in evidence as part of U.S. Document Book B, an excerpt from Documents of German Politics, the official Nazi publication, a document of which the Court can take judicial notice; and I quote from the last five lines of Page 1 of the English translation, appearing on Page 55 of the original German text, which states:
“Also the parties of German Catholicism which were supposed to be most deeply rooted, had to bow to the law of the New Order. On July 4, 1933, the Bavarian People’s Party (Document 27), and on July 5, 1933, the Center Party (Document 29), published an announcement of their dissolution.”
In spite of these evidences of confidence and co-operation or submission on the part of the Catholics, the Nazi conspirators almost immediately commenced a series of violations of the concordat. I offer in evidence Document Number 3476-PS, Exhibit USA-567, being the Papal Encyclical, “Mit brennender Sorge”—in German—by Pope Pius XI on March 14, 1937, and also ask the Tribunal to take judicial notice of all of it. I quote from, the one-page English excerpt . . .
THE PRESIDENT: Did you say 3476 or 3466?