Extracts from a speech, on the 1933 German-Vatican Concordat, anti-Catholic actions and resistance by Catholics, and the deaths of Polish priests and others at Dachau

ALLOCUTION OF HIS HOLINESS POPE PIUS XII TO THE SACRED COLLEGE
June 2nd, 1945
Tipografía Poliglotta Vaticana 1945, Page 4-9
(A public address of Pope Pius XII reported in newspapers of the world on 3 June 1945)
* * * For over twelve years—twelve of the best years of Our
mature age—We had lived in the midst of the German people, fulfilling the duties of the office committed to Us. During that time, in the atmosphere of liberty which the political and social conditions of that time allowed Us, We worked for the consolidation of the status of the Catholic Church in Germany. We thus had occasion to learn the great qualities of that people and We were personally in close contact with its most representative men. For that reason We cherished the hope that it can rise to new dignity and new life when once it has laid the satanic spectre raised by National-Socialism and the guilty (as We have already, at other times had occasion to expound) have expiated the crimes they have committed.
While there was still some faint glimmer of hope that that movement could take another and less disastrous course, either through the disillusionment of its more moderate members or through effective opposition from that section of the German people which opposed it, the Church did everything possible to set up a formidable barrier to the spread of ideas at once subversive and violent.
In spring 1933 the German government asked the Holy See to conclude a Concordat with the Reich: the proposal had the approval of the episcopate and of at least the greater number of German Catholics. In fact they thought that neither the Concordats up to then negotiated with some individual German States (Laender) nor the Weimar Constitution gave adequate guarantee or assurance of respect for their convictions, for their faith, rights, or liberty of action. In such conditions the guarantees could not be secured except through a settlement having
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the solemn form of a Concordat with the Central Government of the Reich. It should be added that, since it was the government that made the proposal, the responsibility for all regrettable consequences would have fallen on the Holy See, if it had refused the proposed Concordat.
It was not that the Church, for her part, had any illusions built on excessive optimism, or that, in concluding the Concordat, she had the intention of giving any form of approval to the teachings or tendencies of National-Socialism ; this was expressly declared and explained at the time (cfr. L'Osservatore Romano, No. 174, July 2nd, 1933). It must, however, be recognized that the Concordat, in the years that followed, brought some advantages, or at least prevented worse evils. In fact, in spite of all the violations to which it was subjected, it gave Catholics a juridical basis for their defense, a stronghold behind which to shield themselves in their opposition—as long as this was possible—to the ever-growing campaign of religious persecution.
The struggle against the Church did, in fact, become ever more bitter: there was the dissolution of Catholic organizations; the gradual suppression of the flourishing Catholic schools, both public and private; the enforced weaning of youth from family and Church; the pressure brought to bear oh the conscience of citizens, and especially of civil servants; the systematic defamation, by means of a clever, closely-organized propaganda, of the Church, the clergy, the faithful, the Church's institutions, teaching and history ; the closing, dissolution, confiscation of religious houses and other ecclesiastical institutions; the complete suppression of the Catholic press and publishing houses.
To resist such attacks millions of courageous Catholics, men and women, closed their ranks around the bishops, whose valiant and severe pronouncements never failed to resound even in these last years of war. These Catholics gathered around their priest?-to help them adapt their ministry to the ever-changing needs and conditions. And, right up to the end, they set up against thé forces of impiety and pride their forces of faith, prayer, and openly Catholic behavior and education.
In the meantime the Holy See itself multiplied its representations and protests to governing authorities in Germany, reminding them, in clear and energetic language, of their duty to respect and fulfill the obligations of the natural law itself that were confirmed by the Concordat. In those critical years, joining the alert vigilance of a pastor to the long-suffering patience of a father, Our great predecessor Pius XI fulfilled his mission as Supreme Pontiff with intrepid courage.
But when, after he had tried all means of persuasion in vain,, he saw himself clearly faced with deliberate violations of a solemn pact, with a religious persecution masked or open, but always rigorously organized, he proclaimed to the world, on Passion Sunday 1937, in his Encyclical "Mit brennender Sorge," what National-Socialism really was: the arrogant apostasy from Jesus Christ, the denial of His doctrine and of His work of redemption, the cult of violence, the idolatry of race and blood, the overthrow of human liberty and dignity.
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"Whoever sets up race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of state, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community .... to be the supreme norm of all, even of religious values, and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God" (cfr. Acta Apost. Sedis, vol. XXIX, 1937, pp. 149 and 171).
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If the rulers of Germany had decided to destroy the Catholic Church even in the old Reich, Providence had decided otherwise. The tribulations inflicted on the Church by National-Socialism have been brought to an end through the sudden and tragic end of the persecutor!
From the prisons, concentration camps, and fortresses are now pouring out, together with the political prisoners, also the crowds of those, whether clergy or laymen, whose only crime was their fidelity to Christ and to the faith of their fathers or the dauntless fulfillment of their duties as priests. For them all We have prayed and have seized every opportunity, whenever the occasion offered, to send a word of comfort and blessing from Our paternal heart.
Indeed the more the veils are drawn which up to now hid the sorrowful passion of the Church under the National-Socialist regime, the more apparent becomes the strength, often steadfast unto death, of numberless Catholics, and the glorious share in that noble contest which belonged to the clergy. Although as yet not in possession of the complete statistics, We cannot refrain from recalling here, by way of example, some details from the abundant accounts which have reached Us from priests and laymen who were interned in the concentration camp of Dachau and were accounted worthy to suffer reproach for the name of Jesus (Acts 5, 41).
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In the forefront, for the number and harshness of the treatment meted out to them, were the Polish priests. From 1940 to 1945, 2,800 Polish ecclesiastics and religious were imprisoned in that camp; among them was the Auxiliary bishop of Wloclawek, who died there of typhus. In April last there were left only 816, all the others being dead except for two or three transferred to another camp. In the summer of 1942, 480 German-speaking ministers of religion were known to be gathered there; of these, 45 were Protestants, all the others Catholic priests. In spite of the continuous inflow of new internees, especially from some dioceses of Bavaria, Rhenania and Westphalia, their number, as a result of the high rate of mortality, at the beginning of this year, did not surpass 350. Nor should we pass over in silence those belonging to occupied territories, Holland, Belgium, France (among whom the Bishop of Clermont), Luxembourg, Slovenia, Italy. Many of these priests and laymen endured indescribable sufferings for their faith and for their vocation. In one case the hatred of the impious against Christ reached the point of parodying on the person of an interned priest, with barbed wire, the scourging and crowning with thorns of our Redeemer.