Dust and Ashes: Another way of dealing with the Refugee Problem

Oleh Unknown

27 Haziran 2012 Çarşamba

Introduction

I cannot imagine a person who was more beleaguered with cries for help from people than Pius XII during the war that started in 1939 and really did not end until 1949 despite Germany’s total capitulation in May of 1945. Nor can I imagine offering unending colonies of beaten, plundered, mutilated, and diseased refugees that were transported on cattle trains into the rump of a bombed out country the Cross. I cannot imagine it, but the Pope could.

It bothers me. What had the cross to do with the Second World War?

Conditions were bad. While Western Allies doused Germans with collective guilt, Eastern Allies hounded, imprisoned, and killed them. Philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) remembered how in the summer of 1945 posters were hung up in all towns and villages. The posters consisted of pictures and stories from Belsen and the crucial statement, “You are the guilty!” Horror gripped many who had indeed not known this, Jaspers wrote, and something rebelled: who indicts me there? No signature, no authority—the poster came as though from empty space. Likewise, the chronicler of the town of Andernach in the Rhineland reported how depressed the mood was. Some people told him that they no longer turned on the radio. It only spoke of the individual and collective guilt of Germans that they had to recognize and accept it, that they had only duties now but no rights and that they must atone for what was done and prove their worth.

But nothing was said about the hundreds of thousands of innocent women and children and old men who burned to death from the bombing. Are the Allies who fought bravely against an intolerable enemy and at great cost to themselves thereby innocent of any wrongdoing in that war?

Between May and August of 1945 “wild expulsions” took place: “wild” because they took place before the three major Allies, Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill met in Potsdam to discuss the “humane” transfer of the defeated from former German territories in the East to the rump of Germany in the West: “wild” also because the rage against German refugee women and children exceeded comprehension. In his “East Prussian Diary,” an unnerved physician Hans von Lehndorff, a Christian of the Confessional Church, asked himself: What is it that we are actually witnessing here? Is it simply an expression of natural savagery or of revenge? Of revenge perhaps, he thought, but in a different sense. Does not the creature revenge itself here against the human being in one and the same person, the flesh against the spirit that was forced upon him? … And these indoctrinated children, fifteen, sixteen years old, that throw themselves like wolves upon women without knowing what it is all about. This has nothing to do with Russia, nothing to do with any particular nation or race – it is humankind without God, the disfigured mask of the human being. – Is Lehndorff saying that young Russians who experienced German atrocities during the war are taking physical revenge on any and all Germans but for the spirit of Nazism that they embodied?

Pius XII acts

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/cf/Ida10-1.jpg

Pius XII was well informed about, and understood, the refugee chaos following the end of the war. But he spoke without accusing, naming, or using the language of violence and provocation. Instead of holocaust he talked about “exceedingly sad incidents,” National Socialism was “unrestrained so-called ‘Nationalism’,” acts of rape were “unworthy acts of violence and severity.” All referred back to “wrong teachings” and wrong behavior that followed it. To the Pope the solution was “work embedded in God’s grace and prayer.”

August 15, 1945, he sent a letter to Archbishop Michael Faulhaber and his fellow Bishops of Bavaria inviting them to the Cross. Taking refuge in the Cross unanimously did not mean giving up hope, he reminded. Quite the contrary, “dependable peace, one based on truth and justice, could only be achieved by following the royal and saving way of the cross” – making the sacrifice by becoming it. Making the sacrifice by becoming the sacrifice?

Rather than accuse all, Pius XII praised the millions of Catholics in Germany who, guided by their bishops’ admonitions, resisted and rejected by the simple means of their Christian faith and lives the ways of the godless and arrogant (that is the Nazis). Rather than accept the victors’ accusations of collective guilt, he said that it was not right nor in accordance with the truth to blame a whole nation for what party men had done.

Within the German rump, the Pope’s call to the cross took shape, literally. He invited German bishops to gather in and give out basic necessities and to build bridges to other nations. By contrast, the priests who knew the moral failings but also the strengths of their parishioners did the in-depth work of boosting trust in God and turning hearts and minds – especially away from the depressing sense of total loss and paralyzing hopelessness.

November 1945 the Pope addressed the Bishops again. We are well informed, he wrote, about the sad happenings in (what once was) Eastern Germany. It is for that reason that we admonish you all urgently, not to repay violence with violence but instead let the power of the law answer. Likewise, during the execution of a prolonged legal procedure, he warned, do not confuse the guilty and punishable person with other citizens who, among other peoples, as among yourselves, are not guilty of the war nor have committed any crime. In other words, don’t retaliate, don’t shift blame.

Whom did the Pope address that Christmas of 1945 when he said? “Anyone who wants to punish perpetrated crimes, take care not to commit the same ones. And he who demands reparations do so on the foundation of moral principles not forgetting that natural rights apply also to those who capitulated unconditionally.” -- The Pope did not exonerate Germans of the brutality they unleashed in the first place. He simply held up the cross to the propagandists of National Socialism, Stalinism, and Western Self-Righteousness – as if to contrast it with godless aggression, revenge, and punishment.

Then he gave his diagnosis of the German soul. “It is fully understandable that not only do the countless ruins of your country hold you in a state of depressing anxiety, but even more serious is the grave damage done to your soul by the guiding principles of those wrong teachings that intended to remove the law of the gospel and replace it with the laws and commandments of race, blood, and arrogance.” Bishops had to promise one another to do everything possible to bring people back to a Christian view, to uncover Nazi preconceptions and mistakes and disperse them.

Archbishop Conrad Gröber makes distinctions

It was the Archbishop of Freiburg in the French zone, Conrad Gröber who wrote a passionate pastoral letter questioning “Collective Guilt.” Initially enthusiastic about National Socialism, he soon became an ardent opponent. He was appalled that those who themselves suffered under the Nazis were now identified with them. He distinguished very clearly between people who committed crimes and the large army of fellow travelers.

Gröber was the first to sense that the notion of collective guilt was used by the Communist East to justify the expulsion, which in turn propelled Germans who survived in the rump to blame incoming refugees of Nazi crimes. So twisted was the German soul that sermons had to explain that refugees were poor because they were plundered not because they were Nazis. Is it their responsibility alone, bishops and priests asked, that an unscrupulous group of our people brought suffering with criminal recklessness upon other peoples and upon us? What happened to the refugees is as much our fault as it is theirs. It is they, however, who suffer in our place.

Six Archbishops compose a letter

As if the full extent of the physical and mental chaos had only sunk in now, and knowing that forced expulsions had not stopped despite the efforts of the Allied Control Council to do that, six archbishops composed a letter dated January 30, 1946 that was read from every pulpit. It started: “We the Catholic bishops can no longer be silent about the terrible fate of more than ten million Eastgermans …We know that especially in the areas of expulsions Germans committed terrible crimes against people belonging to other nations. But since when is it permissible, to take revenge upon the innocent, and to expiate crime with crime? One should bring the really guilty to inexorable account. But who wants to answer for the massive dying of children, mothers, and old people? Who wants to answer for the despairing thousands who in their unspeakable wretchedness take their own lives? We beg and implore that the world public break their silence and that those in power do not put might before right…”

Priests: from complaining to repenting, to building a new existence

The world remained silent and revenge and suicides continued. Thousands died even in the camps that once held Jews. Millions who filled church ruins and open spaces now experienced personally something of the truth of Job: “My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.”

Priests were endangered first by the Nazis and later by the chaos and destruction of the post-war years. For example, of the 393 priests in the small diocese of Ermland, then East Prussia now Poland, 135 died at the front, in concentration camps, or of violence and disease after the war. Another 183 suffered from debilitated health. Only 75 of these priests had enough stamina to do the difficult work of the “Wandering Church” in the Diaspora.

Their job was to invite sometimes uncomprehending, sometimes utterly sick and demoralized refugees to look resolutely at the cross whose weight would now be theirs to carry; to turn from complaining to repenting and from there to building a new existence in the rump. Western Allies were terrified of refugees and, since they saw in them only another form of political radicalization, they dispersed them all over Germany and especially in rural areas. Priests reached them by writing regular circular letters. They organized uncountable pilgrimages, youth events, and beggared for food, paper and straw. Between a 1000 and 16,000 copies of anyone letter were sent by individual priests, but they reached tens of thousands more because people met to read their letters to groups of five to fifty others.

In these letters readers were reminded not only of how priests were persecuted by the Nazis but more importantly of how Nazis persecuted Jews and Slavs. We are now immersed in wretchedness up to our necks; but did we care when, during the years between 1939 and 1943, other countries were crushed by our army and millions of people were robbed of their homelands and lives. Had the Nazis won, a horrible fate would have awaited the defeated, wrote the priest Piekorz early 1947. We are now the sacrificial lamb that is being crucified, but with two differences: first, our conscience tells us that had we won we would have treated them badly; and secondly, while I know that none of you participated in the slaughter of Jews, you were fellow travelers. Therefore, revenge stops here. Knowing what you would have done or allowed to happen had you won, you cannot continue this violence.

People respond

Instead, people organized large penitence processions in cities of the Rhineland and even in the North. Ten to twenty five thousand men in rows of eight followed the cross. Already in 1946, 350,000 youths participated in pilgrimages to Altötting. Pilgrimage sites sprang up everywhere even on the island of Rügen.

It was not the Western press that observed German repentance. The eyes upon them in their conditions of dust and ashes were those of the Mother of God and other saints to whose shrines they wandered. And it was there that eyes were opened to the beauty of their new world and that they began to extract virtue from wretchedness. Let no politician rob them of this surrender.