“If we pass from the ‘Warthegau’ to the other territories in the East, we unfortunately find there, too, acts and measures against the rights of the Church and of the Catholic faithful, though they vary in gravity and extension from one place to another.
“In the provinces which were declared annexed to the German Reich and joined up with the Gaue of East Prussia, of Danzig West Prussia and of Upper Silesia, the situation is very like that described above in regard to seminaries, the use of the Polish mother-tongue in sacred functions, charitable works, associations of Catholic Action, the separation of the faithful according to nationality. There, too, one must deplore the closing of churches to public worship, the exile, deportation, the violent death of not a few of the clergy (reduced by two-thirds in the diocese of Culma and by at least a third in the diocese of Katowice), the suppression of religious instruction in the schools, and above all the complete suppression in fact of the Episcopate. Actually, after the Bishop of Culma, who had left during the military operations, had been refused permission to return to his diocese, there followed in February 1941 the expulsion of the Bishop of Plock and his auxiliary, who both died later in captivity; the Bishop, the venerable octogenarian Monseigneur Julian Anthony Nowowiejski, died at Dzialdowo on May 28th, 1941, and the auxiliary, Monseigneur Leo Wetmanski, ‘in a transit camp’ on October 10th of the same year.
“In the territory called the ‘Generalgouvernement,’ as in the Polish provinces which had been occupied by Soviet troops in the period between September 1939 and June 1941, the religious situation is such as to cause the Holy See lively apprehension and serious preoccupation. Without pausing to describe the treatment meted out in many cases to the clergy (priests imprisoned, deported, and even put to death), the confiscation of ecclesiastical property, the closing of churches, the suppression even of associations and publications of simply and exclusively religious character, the closing of the Catholic secondary and higher schools and of the Catholic University of Lublin, let it suffice to recall two series of specially grave measures: those which affect the seminaries and those which weigh on the Episcopate.
“When the buildings of the various seminaries had been completely or in part occupied, the intention for some time (November 1940-February 1941) was to reduce these institutions for the training of priests to two—those of Kraków and Sandomierz; then the others were permitted to reopen, but only on condition that no new students were admitted, which in practice inevitably means that all these institutions will soon be closed.”
I skip one paragraph here.
“Mention has several times been made of ecclesiastics deported or confined in concentration camps. The majority of them were transferred to the Altreich, where their number already exceeds a thousand.”
THE PRESIDENT: What was the “Altreich”?