Blessed Bernhard Lichtenberg: an ordinary priest facing extraordinary evil

November 5

Blessed Bernhard Lichtenberg: an ordinary priest facing extraordinary evil

By Dawn Beutner

What was it like to be a German Catholic living under Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s? Decades after the fact, it’s easy to demonize Adolf Hitler. Attempted genocide is, after all, demonic. But how did ordinary German Catholics respond when they read propaganda in their newspapers and saw Jews and other minorities being arrested?

It must be admitted that some Germans, including some Catholics, agreed with Hitler. They accepted Hitler’s attempt to blame Jews for the country’s financial struggles after World War I. On the other hand, some German leaders, including Catholic bishops and Protestant churchmen, publicly criticized Nazism.

While the Nazis were generally unwilling to openly retaliate against Church leaders, they were less diplomatic toward ordinary Germans. For example, the leader of Catholic Action in Germany, Erich Klausener, was assassinated by the Gestapo in 1934 after he publicly criticized the regime in a speech. Among the many priests who were arrested, Father Otto Neururer counseled a Catholic woman against marrying a divorced man. The man had friends in high places, and Blessed Otto died a martyr in Buchenwald concentration camp. Every man and every woman must decide how to respond when something objectively evil is being promoted by society.

Before the rise of the Nazis

Blessed Bernhard Lichtenberg (1875-1943) was born into a pious Catholic family in a city now in Poland, then in Prussia. At the time when he was born, the people of Prussia and Germany were experiencing a political struggle now called the Kulturkampf. Liberal leaders sought to control education, passed anti-clerical laws, and found other ways to silence believers. Catholics knew they were outnumbered, so they became politically active. Bernhard’s father and uncle, for example, held positions in a Christian democratic party called the Center Party.

Bernhard discerned that God was calling him to the priesthood when he was young. After ordination, he was sent to Berlin, where he led the first Eucharistic procession that had occurred in his parish since the Protestant Reformation. Next, he was assigned as a pastor for a church with 6,500 parishioners. However, there was only room for 467 people in the church building. Fr. Lichtenberg preached throughout Germany to raise money for a renovation.

Speaking up for truth

In 1929, Bernhard learned that an antisemitic group was holding a public meeting, and the titles of the scheduled talks were clearly anti-Catholic. He showed up and brought some Catholic friends with him. The group’s leader recognized the priest and invited him to sit on the stage with the other speakers. After Fr. Lichtenberg listened to the speaker vilify the Church and the pope for a while, he stood up, took the stage, and rebutted the speaker’s points, one by one. The members of the antisemitic association left, and Bernhard and his fellow Catholics ended the evening by singing pro-Catholic songs.

In 1930, the Nazi Party became the second most powerful party in Germany. The Nazis were advocating for war, so Fr. Lichtenberg joined the Peace Association of German Catholics. When he and a Dominican priest sponsored a showing of the anti-war film All Quiet on the Western Front, Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels publicly attacked them.

Like his father, Bernhard became a member of the Center Party, seeing political involvement as a way of speaking up for the rights of Catholics and for traditional Christian morality. For example, he publicly opposed a proposed sex information center and restrictions on Catholic education. Today some people complain about the arguments he used, but it appears he simply used his opponents’ own language to prove the foolishness of their positions.

In 1931, the Church in Germany prohibited Catholics who participated in the Nazi party from receiving the sacraments. As a chancery official, Bernhard enforced that prohibition.

In 1934, the Nazi government legalized compulsory sterilization of people with physical deformities, alcoholism, or hereditary diseases. Fr. Lichtenberg promoted arguments opposing the law and clarified Church teaching on sterilization by arranging for a papal encyclical on marriage and an article from L’Osservatore Romano to be read at all churches in the diocese.

In 1935, when the horrors occurring in concentration camps were first revealed in a Catholic newspaper, he was so disturbed that he took the article, wrote his own name on it, and personally brought it to the Prussian interior ministry office. He insisted that they take action. They did not.

In 1938, following Kristallnacht—a violent pogrom which destroyed thousands of Jewish businesses and synagogues and arrested tens of thousands of Jews—Fr. Lichtenberg preached in St. Hedwig’s Cathedral in Berlin and said: “We know what happened yesterday. We do not know what tomorrow holds. … Outside, the synagogue burns. That is also a house of God.”¹ From that day forward, he prayed for Jews, Christians of Jewish descent, and imprisoned priests and religious in his public prayers. He also directed a diocesan office that tried to help Jews leave Germany.

Some priests of the archdiocese tended to take a more conciliatory approach toward the Nazis. Some openly sympathized with the regime. Fr. Lichtenberg never backed down. In 1940, he began corresponding with a diocesan priest and theology professor named Karl Adam. Fr. Adam had given a public lecture to a thousand people in which he tried to show “how Christianity and National Socialism could be compatible.”² In his letters, Lichtenberg challenged Adam’s arguments and quoted from Hitler’s Mein Kampf to prove that National Socialism sought to replace, not coexist with, the Christian worldview. In his responses, Adam made it clear that he supported the Nazi party.

In 1941, a woman visited now-Msgr. Lichtenberg and told him that she believed her thirty-eight-year-old son had been euthanized. The Nazis had forcibly institutionalized people with physical and intellectual disabilities, and she, like thousands of others, had received a notice that her son had died unexpectedly. It was no longer plausible to believe that so many deaths were unintentional. The priest wrote a letter of protest to the Reich Health Leader. He related the woman’s heart-rending story and argued against euthanasia. He also said that the “Lord over life and death [would] bring revenge on the German people”³ for this injustice.

His arrest and martyrdom

On August 29, 1941, two Protestant students came to St. Hedwig’s Cathedral to “view the architecture,” and they heard Fr. Lichtenberg publicly pray for Jews during Evening Prayer. They told a friend that they were upset by this, and when the friend’s father—who was an official of the SS—found out, he denounced the priest.

Did those women really just “happen” to hear Msgr. Lichtenberg pray for Jews? He had been publicly doing this for two years, so it was hardly a secret.

Whether this was arranged or accidental, the priest’s home was searched, and he was interrogated for a second time. He admitted that he prayed for Jews, as well as refugees, soldiers on both sides of the war, priests of his diocese who had been imprisoned for their faith, and cities that had been bombed.

Msgr. Lichtenberg’s superior, Bishop Konrad von Preysing, tried to intervene for him. He publicly prayed for Bernhard, visited him in prison, and corresponded with the pope about his arrest.

Lichtenberg was sixty-seven years old and had a weak heart. The Gestapo told him that he could be released if he would promise to not preach during wartime, but he refused. Evidence indicates that the guards then beat the priest and abandoned him with his injuries in a garbage room for two days. When he still did not give in, they sentenced him to the Dachau concentration camp. As he was being transported to the camp, it was obvious that he was ill, and he was sent to a hospital. Fortunately, a Catholic doctor realized that he was dying and contacted the local parish. Msgr. Bernhard Lichtenberg received the Anointing of the Sick before he died on November 5, 1943.

Did he change the course of the war? Save thousands of lives? Probably not. As a priest, he did use the pulpit to educate his flock about the grave injustice being done by the government.

However, many of the things he did to oppose Nazism were the sorts of ordinary things which can be done by anyone. He knew his faith and Catholic social teaching well enough to defend it in public. He showed a movie to educate other people. He wrote letters to government officials and tried to convert his opponents with reason and respect.

Why did Blessed Bernhard Lichtenberg die as a martyr? Because he dared to pray for people whom some believed did not deserve to live. There are times when simply praying is a heroic act, and every ordinary Catholic should want to be that sort of hero.

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