“The struggle against the Church did, in fact, become more and more embittered: the disbanding of Catholic organizations; the progressive suppression of the flourishing Catholic schools, both public and private; the enforced weaning of youth from family and Church; the pressure brought to bear on the conscience of the citizens, and especially of civil servants; the systematic defamation, by means of clever, closely organized propaganda, of the Church, the clergy, the faithful, and of the Church’s institutions, teaching, and history; the closing, disbanding, and confiscation of religious houses and other ecclesiastical institutions; the complete suppression of the Catholic press and publishing houses.”
Do you agree with His Holiness that that is a correct description of the action of the German Reich against the Catholic Church?
VON PAPEN: Completely.
SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: Well now, I would just like you also to look at the “Mit Brennender Sorge,” which is Document 3280-PS.
Your Lordship will find it at Page 40 of Document Book 11—I am sorry, My Lord, it is Page 47. I said 40. It is 40 of the German text.
Now, if you notice, that is quite early, on 14 March 1937, 4 years after the Concordat, and he says in the second sentence at the beginning:
“It discloses intrigues which from the first had no other aim than a war of extermination. In the furrows in which we had labored to sow the seeds of true peace, others—like the enemy in Holy Scripture—sowed the tares of suspicion, discord, hatred, calumny, of secret and open basic hostility to Christ and His Church, fed from a thousand different sources and employing every available means. They, and they only, along with their silent or vocal protectors are responsible for the fact that on the horizon of Germany there is now to be seen, not the rainbow of peace, but the threatening stormcloud of destructive religious wars.”
Now, Defendant, what I want you to tell the Tribunal—do you agree with that?
VON PAPEN: Yes.
SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: If you agree with these statements of the head of the Church, how could you possibly write to Hitler, 2 years after the Concordat, in July 1935, that he had “eliminated political Catholicism without touching the Christian foundations of Germany”? It was absolutely wrong, wasn’t it, that Hitler and the Nazis had not touched the Christian foundations of Germany? They had uprooted them and were in process of destroying them?