How “Catholic” Was the Early Nazi Movement? Religion, Race, and Culture in Munich, 1919–1924

Abstract

Amongthe more durable tenets of postwar West German historiography was the widespread conviction that Catholicism and Nazism were, at some most basic level, mutually exclusive entities. While a flood of critical studies in the 1960s began to erode this conviction at least around the edges — as scholars subjected to greater scrutiny the actual responses of Catholic opinion leaders, the German episcopate, and the Vatican to the Nazi regime — the image of a fundamental, albeit not quite perfect, incompatibility between Catholicism and Nazism has remained essentially intact to the present day. The durability of this image has been due to some degree to the steady stream of primarily apologetic monographs produced by a large and energetic Catholic scholarly community in Germany, whose works have stressed the heroic oppositional stance and victimhood of the Catholic Church during the Third Reich.

Fears of a Feminized Church: Catholicism, Clerical Celibacy, and the Crisis of Masculinity in Wilhelmine Germany

“…I have argued elsewhere that Catholics played a larger role in the early Nazi movement in Munich than has previously been noted. 110 I would mention here in closing that, among other things, the völkisch-oriented visions and images formulated among Reform Catholic masculinists in pre-war Munich can be seen as helping provide a sort of vocabulary with which Nazi activists a few years later could appeal to young, disillusioned Catholic men in Munich. The völkisch advocates of a newly radicalized postwar masculine crisis mentality, sketched famously by Klaus Theweleit and others, were speaking a language that was perhaps not entirely new.…”

Nation, Race, and Religious Identity in the Early Nazi Movement

“…In May 1923, Schlageter, who had traveled to western Germany to oppose the French and Belgian occupation of the Ruhr region, was arrested by the French for terrorist activity and executed by firing squad near Düsseldorf. While Schlageter was mourned and celebrated as a hero by nationalists throughout Germany more generally, the Nazi leadership in Munich decided to make Schlageter into the public face of an ambitious party membership drive that targeted Catholic students in Munich in particular (Hastings 2003). For several months in the summer of 1923 Schlageter became one of the most visible symbols of the party itself, portrayed as the physical incarnation of a harmonious synthesis of nationalist virtue, racial purity, and Catholic identity.…”

“…At its pre-Putsch peak, the NSDAP membership numbered some 55,000 which, in aggregate terms, was less than five percent of the population of Upper Bavaria; see(Hastings 2003).…”