We are Voting for Hitler!

[wm]

True or false?

[David Thompson]

wm -- Please give the source for your graphic.

[wm]

It's just a thing somewhat popular on Facebook.
The idea is to kill it dead here forever here or legitimize it.
In my opinion, it's a little too good to be true.

[Seppo Koivisto]

the evidence indicates that Catholics were significantly less likely to vote for the Nazi Party than Protestants. Consistent with the historical record, our results are most naturally rationalized by a model in which the Catholic Church leaned on believers to vote for the democratic Zentrum Party, whereas the Protestant Church remained politically neutral.

https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/54909/



https://ajps.org/2017/08/10/who-voted-a ... r-and-why/

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi Guys,

These two sets of maps miss more than a few important points.

Most significant is that the Reichskonkordat between Germany and the Vatican City State was signed on 20 July 1933, eight months after the November 1932 map and barely six months after the Nazis first gained office. This was the first international agreement signed by the Nazis in power and added greatly to their credibility, especially among Catholics nationally and internationally.

As a sweetener to achieve it, the Vatican encouraged the Catholic Centre Party to vote for the Enabling Act on 23 March 1933, which gave Hitler dictatorial powers. It then agreed for the Centre Party to dissolve itself on 5 July 1933, so that there was no Catholic party to vote for. This meant that there was no possibility of organized Catholic political opposition to Hitler after that date.

Whereas the Catholic Church, much to Nazi annoyance, maintained a neutral stance during the Saarland Plebiscite on 13 January 1935, in April 1938 Austria's bishops signed a joint letter supporting Hitler's Anschluss Plebiscite, admittedly having been duped by Hitler's promises.

The great majority of Nazi Germany's expansion in the 1930s took in German Catholics. Between 1933 and 1941 Germany went from being a country where only a third (32.4%) of the population were Roman Catholic, to one in which there were nearly as many Catholics (45.66%) as Protestants (48.61%). (If one includes Bohemia Moravia, only 45.32% of the Reich's population in 1941 was Protestant, but 47.77% were Catholic!)

So, the Vatican and Germany's Catholics were not only the first to help the Nazis consolidate power once in office, but were primary beneficiaries of Nazi, irredentist, territorial, expansionist policies throughout the 1930s and early war years.

The two sets of maps above, while doubtless an accurate snapshot of the political/religious situation just before the Nazis gained office, give a false impression if looked at in isolation and not compared with what took place after the Nazis took office.

Cheers,

Sid.

[wm]

That there were more Catholics in Germany in 1941 didn't mean the Vatican and Germany's Catholics were primary beneficiaries.
The number of Catholics in the world didn't change after all. It wasn't like the new Catholics were created by spontaneous generation.

I don't think "added greatly to their credibility" is true, in Poland the press responded with brutal attacks on Nazi Germany, the largest daily called it the lying Hitlerite madhouse.

At the same time, the infamous Four-Power Pact between Britain, France, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany was signed. The pact basically created an overlordship of the four states over Europe.
In comparison, the concordat looked positively innocent.

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi wm,

"Beneficiaries" is a loaded word, but in this case an accurate description of the state of mind of most Catholic Germans who were absorbed into the Reich in the 1930s. Most of them wanted to be part of the Reich and saw it as beneficial to them.

You are right that the Vatican did not benefit, though that was its intention in signing the Reichskonkordat. Having banked the kudos of having won the Konkordat, the Nazis almost immediately began to put new pressure on Germany's Catholic hierarchy and membership, and dismantling its structures. And yet still, in 1938, Austria's bishops could be seduced into backing Anschluss, though without having consulted a, by now, reluctant Vatican in advance.

The Reichskonkordat definitely added greatly to the Nazis' credibility, especially among Catholics. It was the first international agreement signed by the Nazis in power, and with a Vatican City State that saw itself, and was seen by Catholics and some others, as a moral authority in the world.

An almost unknown fact is that it contained a clause, (Article 27), that made provision for Catholic chaplains in the German Army. This was the norm everywhere. However, there was also a secret supplement that began “In case of a change in the present German armed forces in the sense of the introduction of universal conscription….”. In signing this the Vatican was effectively agreeing in writing to a breach of the Versailles Treaty in advance of the fact.

My impression is that the Papacy was completely out of its depth when dealing with people as unprincipled as the Nazis.

Cheers,

Sid.

[ljadw]

The Vatican was realist : the Nazis ruled Germany and there was nothing they could do against it .The Vatican had no illusions about the Nazis but doing as the ostrich would not make them disappear .
Besides : the Vatican was /is also willing to do business with ''unprincipled ''people :after the Russian civil war,they tried to deal with the communists, in China they deal with the communists .
What was better for the Vatican : no deal with Hitler or a deal with Hitler ?

[ljadw]

About the chaplains : there were chaplains in the Reichswehr,why not in the Wehrmacht ?

[ljadw]

Hi Guys,

These two sets of maps miss more than a few important points.

Most significant is that the Reichskonkordat between Germany and the Vatican City State was signed on 20 July 1933, eight months after the November 1932 map and barely six months after the Nazis first gained office. This was the first international agreement signed by the Nazis in power and added greatly to their credibility, especially among Catholics nationally and internationally.

As a sweetener to achieve it, the Vatican encouraged the Catholic Centre Party to vote for the Enabling Act on 23 March 1933, which gave Hitler dictatorial powers. It then agreed for the Centre Party to dissolve itself on 5 July 1933, so that there was no Catholic party to vote for. This meant that there was no possibility of organized Catholic political opposition to Hitler after that date.

Whereas the Catholic Church, much to Nazi annoyance, maintained a neutral stance during the Saarland Plebiscite on 13 January 1935, in April 1938 Austria's bishops signed a joint letter supporting Hitler's Anschluss Plebiscite, admittedly having been duped by Hitler's promises.

The great majority of Nazi Germany's expansion in the 1930s took in German Catholics. Between 1933 and 1941 Germany went from being a country where only a third (32.4%) of the population were Roman Catholic, to one in which there were nearly as many Catholics (45.66%) as Protestants (48.61%). (If one includes Bohemia Moravia, only 45.32% of the Reich's population in 1941 was Protestant, but 47.77% were Catholic!)

So, the Vatican and Germany's Catholics were not only the first to help the Nazis consolidate power once in office, but were primary beneficiaries of Nazi, irredentist, territorial, expansionist policies throughout the 1930s and early war years.

The two sets of maps above, while doubtless an accurate snapshot of the political/religious situation just before the Nazis gained office, give a false impression if looked at in isolation and not compared with what took place after the Nazis took office.

Cheers,

Sid.

There is no proof that the Konkordat increased increased the credibility of the Nazis in and outside Germany .
Most Catholics in and outside Germany were not interested by what the Vatican was saying or doing : in the encyclical Casti Connubii the Pope condemned the use of anti-conception drugs,but no catholic ceased to use them because of his condemnation .
Besides, the Konkordat (for which the Vatican was already working BEFORE Hitler ) was not signed because Hitler was ruling Germany, but although Hitler was ruling Germany : before 1933 there were concordats with several German states, but not with the central government, after January 31 1933 the states lost all power,thus a concordat was needed with the central government,whoever was leading this government .The longer the Vatican waited, the worse the situation would become and the less benefit the Vatican could have from the concordat .
I like to add that, opposite to what some people are thinking, there was no such thing as a catholic block,a catholic vote : the church did not decide how the Catholics would vote : before 1933 only a minority of the German Catholics voted for the catholic party ( the Zentrumpartei ) and they did not vote for this party because they were catholic.The Zentrum party ruled,together with the Socialists,Prussia til 1932 .and was an opponent of the Nazis .But the Zentrum party was not the German Catholics .
Religion played no role in the elections of 1932 or before : people voted for economic reasons,for local reasons, for personnel reasons, Catholics voted for the SPD,for the conservatives, some also for the KPD. Catholics voted for the protestant Hindenburg or for the (nominally ) catholic Hitler, but the religion of both was irrelevant for how people voted .

[wm]

An almost unknown fact is that it contained a clause, (Article 27), that made provision for Catholic chaplains in the German Army. This was the norm everywhere. However, there was also a secret supplement that began “In case of a change in the present German armed forces in the sense of the introduction of universal conscription….”. In signing this the Vatican was effectively agreeing in writing to a breach of the Versailles Treaty in advance of the fact.

The Vatican wasn't a party to the Versailles Treaty, wasn't even invited, so it couldn't breach it.

The Reichskonkordat was signed on 20 July 1933, but the much more important and much more far-reaching Four-Power Pact five days earlier (and had been negotiated since 19 March 1933) so isn't true the Reichskonkordat was the first and that it added greatly to Nazi credibility.

The Four-Power Pact was devastating to Poland because the Allies accepted the main Polish enemy - Germany as their equals. Simultaneously Poland became a politically less important state.

The Czech enthusiastic support for the Pact led to the final Polish decision to abandon any new efforts to create an alliance with the Czechs. Since then all the efforts were focused on Hungary and Slovakia.

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi wm,

Did I post anything about the Vatican being a party to the Versailles Treaty? No.

Did I say that the Vatican breached the treaty? No.

So I don't have to defend either of those points.

What I actually wrote was, "An almost unknown fact is that it contained a clause, (Article 27), that made provision for Catholic chaplains in the German Army. This was the norm everywhere. However, there was also a secret supplement that began “In case of a change in the present German armed forces in the sense of the introduction of universal conscription….”. In signing this the Vatican was effectively agreeing in writing to a breach of the Versailles Treaty in advance of the fact."

You are right that the Reichskonkordat was signed five days after the Four Power Pact. I should have used the word "bilateral" in there. However, preparations for it on the Vatican side, at least, began before those for the Four Power Pact.

Before Nazis came to office in January 1933, the Catholic Centre Party was a mainstay of anti-Nazi politics. However, in barely six months the Vatican persuaded the Centre Party to vote Hitler dictatorial powers and dissolve itself. This had striking echoes of what had happened in Italy in 1924, when the Vatican had encouraged the dissolution of the Catholic Italian Popular Party (PPI) in order to lay the ground work for the Lateran Treaty of 1929 with Fascist Italy that established the Vatican City State.

The key figure in this seems to be Eugenio Pacelli. His brother was the chief Vatican lawyer during the negotiation of the Lateran Treaty with Fascist Italy in the late 1920s. Eugenio was Nuncio to Bavaria from 1917 to 1922 and to Germany from 1922 to 1930. He then became Secretary of State (Foreign Minister) of the Vatican until 1939, during which he oversaw the Reichskonkordat. He was then elected as Pope Pius XII only days before Hitler occupied Bohemia and Moravia.

Pacelli was a cultural Germanophile who had been traumatised when briefly held at gunpoint by Communists in Munich in 1919. He thus seemed inclined to cut a certain amount of slack towards any Germans (or, indeed, others) who showed anti-Communist tendencies, despite their own failings. Hitler certainly qualified as one such anti-Communist with feet of clay, and Pacelli was delighted when he banned the German Communist Party very soon after gaining office in early 1933. The Enabling Act, dissolution of the Centre Party and Reichskonkordat followed in quick succession, all of which Pacelli approved and oversaw on behalf of Pius XI.

Having banked the prestige they had gained from the Reichskonkordat and emasculated Catholic political opposition, the Nazis almost immediately resumed their persecution of German Catholic institutions, such as removing their influence from education and youth movements. They also made much of paedophile and financial malpractice accusations against Catholic clergy.

To his credit, Pius XI belatedly realised the nature of the Nazis. On Palm Sunday, 12 March 1937, he had a papal encyclical, titled With Deep Anxiety, read from every Roman Catholic pulpit in Germany that reproved all these moves. Regarding the Reichskonkordat he stated, “….anyone must acknowledge, not without surprise and reprobation, how the other contracting party emasculated the terms of the treaty, distorted their meaning, and eventually considered its more or less official violation as a normal policy.” This infuriated Hitler, who was angry that the Catholic Church's pulpits provided an avenue outside his control by which anti-Nazi positions could be widely disseminated to tens of millions of Germans.

In 1938 Pius XI was preparing to attack not just the Nazis' anti-Catholicism, but their wider racism in a new encyclical, Unity of the Human Race (Humani generis unitas), that extended his criticism to their treatment of Jews. There were even whispers of him excommunicating Hitler, who had been born a Roman Catholic. However, Pius XI died on 10 February 1939 and his successor, Eugenio Pacelli, withheld the encyclical’s contents for the twenty years of his own Papacy.

The Papacy, which had been physically confined inside the Vatican complex from 1870 to 1929, emerged blinking into a much more secular world it was ill-equipped to deal with. As a result, the unscrupulous likes of Hitler ran rings round it during the 1930s. Pius XI was clearly a sincere man, and Pius XII was certainly not "Hitler's Pope", but both proved useful tools of the Nazis. They supped with the Devil without first equipping themselves with sufficiently long spoons!

The Nazis continued to worry about the danger of Catholic disaffection and disloyalty well into the war. On 17 April, 1941, Goebbels thought, ".....it possible to silence Vatican radio. This would be highly desirable since the Vatican radio is more troublesome than, say, a Communist transmitter, which in Germany no longer has a constituency to direct itself to, simply because it addresses itself to forty million (German) Catholics who do not consider it a crime to listen to it, since most believe it to be a religious institution.” In the event, he need not have worried, because German Catholics remained very largely loyal to the Nazis' Third Reich to the end.

Which brings us back to the two sets of maps illustrated above by you and Seppo, and the need to provide more context for them.

Cheers,

Sid.

[wm]

You wrote "agreeing in writing to a breach of the Versailles Treaty," the Vatican wasn't its signatory so it couldn't possibly breach the treaty.
The Vatican could have signed any treaty with Germany it wanted, it could have sold tanks to the Germans with impunity - without breaching the Treaty.

Another thing, from the international point of view the Hitler's coalition government was perfectly legal from day one of its existence - it didn't need any legitimization.
The Soviet genocidal state, Latin America's brutal dictatorial governments, including the bloody Calles government were perfectly legal so why not the German one?
Well, even the enormous British, French, Belgian, Portugal, Spanish colonial empires were legal although they were the direct result of conquests the world hadn't ever seen.

[wm]

All this is primarily a matter for Germany herself. Only if these methods are applied to foreign subjects or transferred to the field of foreign affairs would they become a matter of concern to other countries, and a development in that sense would have the immediate, inevitable, and deplorable effect of isolating Germany and driving foreign governments to a concert of policy together against her.

This is a development which every country in Europe, indeed everywhere, is most definitely anxious to avoid. ... "There is nothing yet to show that the new Chancellor intends to be immoderate in his foreign policy. It Is his set purpose—and in that he has much sympathy outside his own country, to re-establish Germany on a footing of equality with other nations, and the internal excesses of his regime should not debar foreign statesmanship from examining. with an open mind to the external claims of Germany as they would those of any other government.

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi wm,

You are not reading what I wrote, either originally or since. To repeat:

Did I post anything about the Vatican being a party to the Versailles Treaty? No.

Did I say that the Vatican breached the treaty? No.

So I don't have to defend either of those points.

What I actually wrote was, "An almost unknown fact is that it contained a clause, (Article 27), that made provision for Catholic chaplains in the German Army. This was the norm everywhere. However, there was also a secret supplement that began “In case of a change in the present German armed forces in the sense of the introduction of universal conscription….”. In signing this the Vatican was effectively agreeing in writing to a breach of the Versailles Treaty in advance of the fact." "

You post, "The Vatican could have signed any treaty with Germany it wanted, it could have sold tanks to the Germans with impunity - without breaching the Treaty." True, but Germany would be breaching the Treaty if it bought tanks off anyone. In that case, as with the secret supplement on future German conscription, the Vatican would be complicit in a breach of the Treaty.

The Vatican must have known that in agreeing to it, it was being potentially complicit in a breach of the Treaty of Versailles. One has to suspect that that was the reason that both parties agreed to put the article on future German conscription in a secret supplement.

And what on earth is all this nonsense about "legal", and "legitimization"? Where have I ever questioned the initial legitimacy of Hitler's regime? You really ought to read what I post before picking fantasy fights over things I have not written. We can't have a serious discussion if you just make stuff up!

Cheers,

Sid.