Nazi persecution of the Catholic Church in Poland

The Polish Franciscan St Maximillian Kolbe died at Auchwitz.

The Catholic Church in Poland was brutally suppressed by the Nazis during the German Occupation of Poland (1939-1945).

Background

The invasion of predominantly Catholic Poland by Nazi Germany in 1939 ignited the Second World War. Britain and France declared war on Germany as a result of the invasion, while the Soviet Union invaded the Eastern half of Poland in accordance with an agreement reached with Hitler. The Catholic Church in Poland was about to face decades of repression, both at Nazi and Communist hands. Hundreds of priests and nuns are among the 5000 Polish Catholics honoured by Israel for their role in saving Jews.

Soviet Prime Minister Vyacheslav Molotov signs the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Behind him stand (left) German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and (right) Joseph Stalin. In effect, the Pact created a Nazi-Soviet alliance and sealed the fate of Poland.

Historically, the church had been a leading force in Polish nationalism against foreign domination, thus the Nazis targeted clergy, monks and nuns in their terror campaigns. Treatment was at its most severe in the annexed regions, where churches were systematically closed and the majority of priests were either murdered, imprisoned or deported. Seminaries and convents were closed.

Nazi ideology was hostile to Christianity and Hitler held the teachings of the Catholic Church in contempt. Hitler's chosen deputy and private secretary, Martin Bormann, was firmly anti-Christian as was the official Nazi philosopher, Alfred Rosenberg. In his "Myth of the Twentieth Century", published in 1930 Rosenberg wrote that the main enemies of the Germans were the "Russian Tartars" and "Semites" - with "Semites" including Christians, especially the Catholic Church:

Persecutions

Polish prisoners in Dachau toast their liberation from the camp. Poles constituted the largest ethnic group in the camp and the largest proportion of those imprisonded in the Priest Barracks of Dachau.

German policy towards the Church was at its most severe in the territories it annexed to Greater Germany. Here the Nazis set about systematically dismantling the Church - arresting its leaders, exiling its clergymen, closing its churches, monasteries and convents. Many clergymen were murdered. Elsewhere in occupied Poland, the suppression was less severe, though still harsh.

According to Norman Davies, the Nazi terror was "much fiercer and more protracted in Poland than anywhere in Europe." Nazi ideology viewed ethnic "Poles" - the mainly Catholic ethnic majority of Poland - as "sub-humans". Following their 1939 invasion of West Poland, the Nazis instigated a policy of genocide against Poland's Jewish minority and of murdering or suppressing the ethnic Polish elites: including religious leaders. In 1940, Hitler proclaimed: "Poles may have only one master – a German. Two masters cannot exist side by side, and this is why all members of the Polish intelligentsia must be killed."

Between 1939 and 1945, an estimated 3,000 members (18%) of the Polish clergy, were murdered; of these, 1,992 died in concentration camps. During the 1939 invasion, special death squads of SS and police arrested or executed those considered capable of resisting the occupation: including professionals, clergymen and government officials. The following summer, the A-B Aktion (Extraordinary Pacification Operation) further round up of several thousand Polish intelligentsia by the SS saw many priests shot in the General Government sector.

Eighty per cent of the Catholic clergy and five bishops of Warthegau were sent to concentration camps in 1939; 108 of them are regarded as blessed martyrs. Around 1.5 million Poles were transported to work as forced labor in Germany. Treated as racially inferior, they had to wear purple P's sewn in to their clothing - sexual relations with Poles was punishable by death. Beyond the genocide of the Polish Jews, it is estimated that 1.8 to 1.9 million Polish civilians were killed during the German Occupation and the war.

Pope Pius XII

Pope Pius XII faced the invasion of Poland soon after his election as Pope. In his first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, Pius wrote:

[This is an] "Hour of Darkness"... in which the spirit of violence and of discord brings indescribable suffering on mankind... The nations swept into the tragic whirlpool of war are perhaps as yet only at the "beginnings of sorrows"... but even now there reigns in thousands of families death and desolation, lamentation and misery. The blood of countless human beings, even noncombatants, raises a piteous dirge over a nation such as Our dear Poland, which, for its fidelity to the Church, for its services in the defense of Christian civilization, written in indelible characters in the annals of history, has a right to the generous and brotherly sympathy of the whole world, while it awaits, relying on the powerful intercession of Mary, Help of Christians, the hour of a resurrection in harmony with the principles of justice and true peace.

— Summi Pontificatus - Pope Pius XII, Oct. 1939

Resistance

Memorial to Pope John Paul II, in Krakow, Poland. As a young man, John Paul II had participated in the Polish cultural resistance to the Nazi occupation of Poland.

Adam Sapieha, Archbishop of Lvov, became the defacto head of the Polish church following the invasion. He openly criticised Nazi terror. One of the principle figures of the Polish Resistance, Sapieha opened a clandestine seminary in an act of cultural resistance. Among the seminarians was Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II. Wojtyla had been a member of the Rhapsodic Theatre, an underground resistance group, which sought to sustain Polish culture through forbidden readings of poetry and drama performances.

Poland had its own tradition of anti-Semitism, but Polish literature asserts that hundreds of clergymen and nuns were involved in aiding Poland's Jews during the war, though precise numbers are difficult to confirm. From 1941, such aid carried the death penalty. A number of Bishops provided aid to Polish Jews, notably Karol Niemira, the Bishop of Pinsk, who co-operated with the underground organization maintaining ties with the Jewish ghetto and sheltered Jews in the Archbishop's residence.

In late 1942 the Zegota (codename for the Council to Aid Jews - Rada Pomocy Żydom) was established in co-operation with church groups. It was instigated by the writer Zofia Kossak-Szczucka and Catholic democrat activists. It saved thousands. Poland was the only country in occupied Europe where such an organisation was established. For their protection, Jewish children were often placed in church orphanages and convents by the group. Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a co-founder of Zegota, had worked with the Catholic underground movement, the Front for the Rebirth of Poland, and was arrested in a 1940 Nazi purge of the intelligentsia, and sent to Auchwitz. Freed seven months later following pressure from the international Red Cross, Bartoszewski and Zegota saved thousands. Explaining his motivation, he later said: "I was raised a Catholic and we were taught to love our neighbour. I was doing what the Bible taught."

The midwife Stanisława Leszczyńska worked in the "maternity ward" at Auchwitz, defying Dr Joseph Mengele's order to murder the infants. Oscar Schindler, a German Catholic businessman came to Poland, initially to profit from the German invasion. He went on to save many Jews, as dramatised in the film Schindler's List.

In Slonim, the Jesuit Adam Sztark rescued Jewish children by issuing back-dated Catholic birth certificates. He called on his parishioners to assist fleeing Jews and is believed to have snuck into the Jewish ghetto to assist those inside. He was arrested by the Germans in December 1942, and shot. Matylda Getter, mother superior of the Franciscan Sisters of the Family of Mary, hid many children in her Pludy convent. In Kolonia Wilenska, Sister Anna Borkowska hid men from the Jewish underground from the Vilna ghetto.

Martyrs

The Polish Church honours 108 Martyrs of World War II, including the 11 Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth murdered by the Gestapo in 1943 and known as the Blessed Martyrs of Nowogródek. The Polish church opened the cause of Józef and Wiktoria Ulma to the process of canonisation in 2003. The couple and their family were murdered for sheltring Jews.

Among the most revered Polish martyrs was the Franciscan, Saint Maximillian Kolbe, who died at Auschwitz-Birkenau, having offered his own life to save a fellow prisoner who had been condemned to death by the camp authorities. The cell in which he died is now a shrine. During the War he provided shelter to refugees, including 2,000 Jews whom he hid in his friary in Niepokalanów.

See also

• Catholic Church and Nazi Germany
• Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles
• Soviet repressions of Polish citizens (1939–1946)