"Thou shalt not kill." God engraved this commandment on the souls of men long before any penal code... God has engraved these commandments in our hearts... They are the unchangeable and fundamental truths of our social life... Where in Germany and where, here, is obedience to the precepts of God? [...] As for the first commandment, "Thou shalt not have strange gods before me," instead of the One, True, Eternal God, men have created at the dictates of their whim, their own gods to adore: Nature, the State, the Nation, or the Race.
― Bishop Galen's denunciation of Aktion T4.
Clemens Augustinus Emmanuel Joseph Pius Anthonius Hubertus Marie, Graf von Galen (16 March 1878 - 22 March 1946) was a German Catholic cardinal who was Bishop of Münster from 1933 until his death in 1946. He was declared a saint in 2005, and his feast day is 22 March.
From 1934 onwards, Bishop Galen was an outspoken opponent of Nazi policies, to the point that Nazi official Walter Tiessler attempted to have him executed. He, alongside Michael von Faulhaber and Konrad von Preysing, helped Pope Pius XI to draft and distribute his 1937 anti-Nazi encyclical With Burning Concern. He was also vocal in his opposition to Nazi racial politics, in particular its focus on the purity of bloodlines and rejection of the Old Testament as Jewish propaganda, equating the Nazi's undying adherence to these views to slavery.
Bishop Galen was visited by SS General Jürgen Stroop in 1934 after delivering a sermon deriding Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg's racial policies, especially his policy of euthanizing or sterilizing the disabled in order to purify the gene pool. Stroop threatened to confiscate Church property from the Münster diocese unless Galen publicly recanted his sermon and supported Rosenberg. Galen refused to ever accept or support Rosenberg's policies before launching into a rant against the Nazi attempts to introduce paganism as Germany's new religion and kicking Stroop and his adjutant out of his house.
By 1941, Bishop Galen had begun outright attacking the Nazi government as a whole instead of simply its racial policies. He gave several sermons attacking the Gestapo secret police for confiscating Church property and mistreating Catholics. 1941 was also when Galen gave his most famous sermons, exposing the Nazi Aktion T4 program (the attempts to kill all those deemed by the state to be "defective"). In these sermons, he was the first person to reveal the existence of the program, as he had evidence that the authorities were deporting disabled people to unknown locations where they would always mysteriously die a few weeks later. He accused the Nazis of violating the first and sixth commandments with this program, and rhetorically asked if wounded German soldiers fell under the heading of "defective". This sermon lead to widespread protest across Germany and eventually resulted in Aktion T4 being indefinitely suspended (although killings of the disabled continued in secret until the fall of the Nazi government in 1945).
Following the T4 sermon, Galen was placed under house arrest until the end of the war. Despite this, he was still able to collaborate with other German bishops to draft a 1943 encyclical condemning various Nazi atrocities. After the end of World War 2, Galen began protesting against war crimes committed by Allied troops against the German population, such as the mass rapes of German women by Russian soldiers, the deportation of ethnic Germans from Allied territories and what he saw as the unjust prosecutions of German military leaders convicted under command responsibility.
Galen died of appendicitis on 22 March 1946 and was posthumously declared a saint by Pope Benedict XVI in 2005.
Trivia[]
- It is disputed whether or not Galen was anti-Semitic, which would be the only aspect of Nazi racial theory that he supported. Those who say he was point to a 1935 sermon in which he referenced "the sins of the Jews" and his failure to protest the Nazi persecution of Jews, whereas those who say he wasn't point to his close friendship with rabbi Fritz Steinthal and a 1938 edict issued by the Münster diocese instructing all pastors to recommend a brochure condemning anti-Semitism to their congregation.