He chose Neclaudibusnectimore as his motto. Blessed Clemens August, Graf von Galen, Roman Catholic bishop of Münster, Germany, was noted for his public opposition to Nazism. Of the 10,000 Berlin Jews arrested in the Final Roundup, 8,000 were murdered at Auschwitz. The remaining 2,000 were to experience a different fate. These Jews, related by marriage to Aryan Germans, were locked up at Rosenstrasse 2-4, an administrative centre of the Jewish community in the heart of Berlin. The Aryan spouses, who were mostly women, hurried alone or in pairs to the Rosenstrasse, where they discovered a growing crowd. A protest broke out when the hundreds of women at the gate began calling out, “Give us our husbands back!” Day and night for a week they staged their protest, and the crowd grew larger.

The headquarters of his section of the Gestapo was just around the corner, within earshot of the protesters. A few bursts from a machine gun could have emptied the square. Instead, the Jews were released. Goebbels decided that the simplest way to end the protest was to give in to the protesters’ demands. “A large number of people gathered and in part even took sides with the Jews,” Goebbels complained in his diary on March 6. “I ordered the (Gestapo) not to continue Jewish evacuation at so critical a moment. We want to save that up for a couple of weeks. We can then go after it all the more thoroughly.” But the Jews married to Aryans remained. They survived the war.

‘All roads to power start with the people,’ the Führer had written. In the interest of maintaining power, the Nazi dictatorship released Jews. Also responding to the force of popular opinion, Hitler ordered a stop to ‘euthanasia’—as the Nazis called the murder of the insane and deformed—by gassing. In nineteen months, from January of 1940 to August of 1941, euthanasia claimed some seventy thousand victims. But the doctors and bureaucrats grew careless: families of those murdered received two urns of ashes, persons who had long ago had appendectomies were reported to have died of appendicitis, and asylum staff members, tongues loosened at the local pub, let slip the tale of their ghastly work.

But the leaders who condemned euthanasia from the pulpit were effective only because they represented the public will. The regime was probably not much worried about a few letters from a bishop here or there: isolated individuals could be threatened into silence or imprisoned and their letters could be burned. Von Galen was not executed, because the public loved and respected him. And he made public what the regime meant to keep secret. In July and August of 1941 Von Galen preached three blistering sermons from his pulpit in Münster-Westphalia against the lawless power of the Gestapo, warning his congregation that no one was safe from arbitrary arrest and punishment, and that, according to the logic of a program that sacrificed those who were of no obvious productive use to the war effort, the state could soon be administering euthanasia to wounded soldiers at the front as well as to cripples, the old, and the weak. Walter Tiessler, an official in the party chancellery, suggested to Goebbels that Von Galen be hanged. But Goebbels told Tiessler that only Hitler himself could condemn the bishop to die. He also said, “If something against the bishop was done, one could forget about receiving support of the people of Münster for the rest of the war”—perhaps, he went on, even the population of the entire region of Westphalia.

Hitler backed away from confrontation with the German Churches “because he thought this was bad for the morale of Germany’s armed forces.” The churches might well have forced the Nazi regime to stop the Holocaust if they had spoken out against the persecution of the Jews with the same vigour as they had shown in the case of ‘Euthanasia.’” It seems beyond any doubt that if the Churches had opposed the persecution of the Jews as they opposed the killing of the congenitally insane and sick, there would have been no Final Solution. On November 9–10, 1938, Nazi leaders unleashed a series of pogroms, called Kristallnacht, against the Jewish population in Germany and recently incorporated territories. No prominent Church leaders publicly protested these violent assaults. Walter Benjamin wrote, “The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.”