Holy Crosses & Nazi Flags
Pope Benedict XVI and the Catholic Church
by Garry O’Connor
Copyright © Garry O’Connor 2010
www.garryoconnor.co.uk
Published in ebook format by Amolibros at Smashwords 2010
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Cover photograph Sergey Kozhukhov
Author’s Note
‘Publish and be damned’ is literally the animus behind this e-book, published to coincide with the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to the United Kingdom in September 2010. Mainstream publishers judged it finished at all too short a date from inception to final text to be printed conventionally in time. Hence the e-book.
I began research and interviews with a view to writing a life or portrait of Pope Benedict three years ago, after the pope had been on the throne of St Peter for two years. I had a good reason for this. Not only was the pope one of the most important figures on earth, but also this pope, I felt, was the supreme example of the evolution of an outstanding intellect, combined, however, with an unusual power of survival, and ability to reach the very pinnacle of achievement at the age of seventy-eight. Here was an extraordinarily person of mature belief, who had recognised and consistently applied to all his written works, his homilies and actions, the values of objective and clear thought, and of the careful use of evidence, maintaining these as the outstanding and lasting qualities of the human race.
It seemed to me then, in direct contrast to this, that the press and the majority of secular and scientific non-believers in Western Europe and the United States had seriously misjudged him, if not actually demonised him. In spite of evidence to the contrary during his early years as pope, they had cast him as a shadowy, sinister figure of previous sound bites and headlines, and sought to find new ammunition to keep waging an increasingly hostile war against Christianity— and in particular the Catholic Church.
But as his papacy went on, and as with time as I dug deeper, and read and questioned with more dedicated research, I found a more ambiguous figure emerging, and began to wonder why this should be so. Also, perhaps more to the point, he seemed with time to be increasingly alienating his faithful. In my six children and their generation he failed to awaken any chord of sympathy, while the force and appeal of Roman Catholicism in the world I could see was rapidly shrinking. I may be seriously mistaken, but the reason was, I believed, to be found in the personality and the background of the man, which he had not managed to escape. I can only regret that this should be so, and that my view changed sharply.
In the last ten years the world has undergone profound upheavals and been changed at a greater pace than ever before. The historic, coercive principle of trying to instil obedience among Catholics through papal infallibility and authoritarian dogma had been dying for many years, but now had become powerless in a world where billions have work or culture stations of their own. People can access every kind of information and source, and so are able to make up their own minds about final causes, about spirituality, about faith, as well as about most other things. The appeal of the Catholic Church could therefore no longer lie in its authoritarianism, or even its authoritativeness. By the same token it was sad to see some sections of the English press, before the pope’s visit in September, trying to silence criticism of the pope, behaving in the way the papacy no longer could or should behave.
One of the most timeless and appealing virtues of the church used to be its openness. During the dark days early in the second world war, the exiled Elias Canetti, living in London and later to be become a British Nobel laureate, wrote that the quality of the Catholic Church was that it offered the very opposite of Nazi triumphalism and self-intoxication: ‘deliberation, calm, and spaciousness. Its very name contains its chief claim, which is that it has room for everyone. Its expectation is that everyone will turn to it.’
If you add to that image of the human person nurtured and championed by Pope John Paul II, as well as that of the individual proposed by the earlier Joseph Ratzinger, then you have the essence of that virtue.
Ratzinger wrote: ‘Over the pope as expression of the binding claim of ecclesiastical authority there stands one’s own conscience, which must be obeyed before all else, even if necessary against the requirements of ecclesiastical authority. This emphasis on the individual, whose conscience confronts him with a supreme and ultimate tribunal, and over in the last resort is beyond the claims of external social groups, even the official Church, also establishes a principle in opposition to increasing totalitarianism’— He also distinctly and quickly told a journalist in 1996, when asked ‘How many ways are there to God?’—’As many ways as there are people.’
But now it was the church itself led by him which wallowed in fearful triumphalism. I suggest reasons for this in the following pages.
I thank all those who have, either wittingly or unwittingly, helped me. A fuller and expanded edition of this book, updated and with detailed references, full acknowledgements, source notes and index, is for the future. For the present, time has been of the essence.
Garry O’Connor, 1 September 2010, www.garryoconnor.co.uk
About the Book
Holy Crosses & Nazi Flags shows for the first time in fascinating detail the impact on Pope Benedict XVI of his early years during the rise and fall of Hitler’s Third Reich. Concentrating as Garry O’Connor does on that period, the portrait reveals that underneath (like the hidden nine tenths of the iceberg) Benedict is in many ways an entirely different being from the one he is generally supposed to be (and often demonised as). Thus it provides entirely new insight into his character, and, sometimes directly, sometimes by implication or inference, the difficulties or mishaps of his papacy.
About the Author
Garry O’Connor was born in London into a family of well-known singers. From St Alban’s School he won a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge where he read English and was President of University Actors. He worked in the theatre for ten years before reviewing for the Financial Times, and then became a full-time biographer and novelist. He is married with six children, and lives on a farm on the Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire border. He has published nearly twenty books; his first biography was that of his great-aunt Dame Maggie Teyte. His Universal Father: A Life of Pope John Paul II (Bloomsbury) has sold worldwide in English-speaking countries, and been translated into Polish and Swedish. It was selected by the Irish Independent as part of its ‘Great Biography’ collection (2007), marketed with the newspaper. It is now also a Kindle book. A.N. Wilson wrote in the Mail on Sunday, ‘O’Connor, whose previous books include superb biographies of Laurence Olivier, Alec Guinness, Ralph Richardson and Paul Scofield, is very much at home in this warm portrait of the greatest actor manager of them all.’ The Glasgow Herald called it ‘A fine, enduring biography’. Damion Thompson’s review in the Daily Telegraph claimed that the biography was the ‘only life of the late Pope that is an artistic achievement in its own right. None of O’Connor’s predecessors has matched his exposition of the literary, philosophical and dramatic sources of John Paul’s pontificate, or his nimble untangling of the strands of theological argument.’
Of the theatre lives, Simon Callow in the Financial Times called the Ralph Richardson life, ‘A masterpiece’. Darlings of the Gods, the account of Vivien Leigh and Laurence Oliver’s marriage and Australian tour of 1948, was filmed in 1991 for television as a three-part mini-series, and shown all over the world. The highly praised biography of Shakespeare (1990, revised in US edition 2001), hailed by Publisher’s Weekly as ‘a gem’, and by the Mail on Sunday as ‘illuminating and entertaining’, is still in print. Others include his longest work, Sean O’Casey, ‘written with tenderness and great technical skill’—Richard Holmes, The Times, and ‘well and honestly done and it is highly recommended’—Anthony Burgess, Independent.
Of his most recent works, The Literary Review called O’Connor’s second biography of Alec Guinness (The Unknown, 2004) ‘A brilliant detective story…one of the truly great actor biographies of our time.’ The Independent said it was ‘riveting’, while the Guardian claimed that O’Connor’s openness to Guinness’s hitherto unexplored sexuality ‘has resulted in a theatrical biography that goes far beyond the reach of such books, and is his best so far’.
The Darlings of Downing Street: the Psycho-Sexual Drama of Power (Politico’s 2007), a joint biography of the Blairs during their tenure of power, describes how, according to Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail ‘the geo-political game, it seems, was but a sideshow to the Blairs’ marital dynamic and Mr Blair’s narcissistic urges’. Harry Reid in the Glasgow Herald said that it was ‘Eloquent, a climactic tirade, a credible mountain of condemnation…presented with coruscating force.’ Geoffrey Goodman said it ‘provided a flavour of Blairism in power which is unlikely to be bettered’. But the Blairite Financial Times viewed it as ‘the high-water mark of political pornography’. For the Contemporary Review it was ‘an interesting perspective on the politics of the UK over the last ten years…[and] a highly entertaining read with countless quotations offering surprising perspectives’. To sum up, the Sunday Express called it ‘a highly charged assessment of a pair of ham actors who saw politics as a performance art,’ recommending it with five stars.
In the other recent book, the novel Chaucer’s Triumph, Penelope Middleboe describes on Booktribes how O’Connor ‘takes on Chaucer at his own game—with a cast of tellers, this time on a journey from Leicester to London, teasing out a tale of eroticism and intrigue’. Chaucer’s Triumph is Garry O’Connor’s triumph,’ writes Roger Lewis, ‘Epic, comic, pastoral, tragical, and crammed with living energy.’ ‘O’Connor’s greatest achievement,’ says the Historical Novel Society, ‘is his warm, wise, and humorous portrayal of the poet Chaucer’. Peter Curran on Radio 4 Loose Ends said it ‘cries out for television adaptation’. ‘This is a book,’ comments Faith Magazine, ‘I can imagine D.H. Lawrence writing if he were a Catholic.’
Garry O’Connor is working on The Ultimate Doctor Faust, the biography of Hans Frank, the ‘Butcher of Poland’. He has just finished a new novel, The Book That Kills. He has written and presented programmes for Radio 4 and 3, adapted his earlier novel about John Donne, Campion’s Ghost, for Radio 4, and been interviewed frequently on TV and radio. His website is www.garryoconnor.co.uk.
His most recent books are The Darlings of Downing Street: the Psycho-Sexual Drama of Power (Politico’s) and his novel Chaucer’s Triumph (Petrak Press).
Review by Michael Holroyd
‘This trenchant portrait of Joseph Ratzinger, His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, traces his career from being the “pied piper of Lower Bavaria” to becoming “God’s Rottweiler” in Rome. It is Garry O’Connor’s most challenging, dramatic and controversial biography—a case for the prosecution that accuses the Pope of damaging the hierarchy of Catholicism and calls for him to “step down”. He argues that Ratzinger’s remoteness, his illiberal principles, his evasive and inadequate response to Nazi anti-semitism and priestly paedophilia have stripped him of all moral, political and spiritual authority. It is an argument that will shock many readers and intensify opposition to the Pope’s visit to Britain.’
Contents
Part One 1917-1951
1 Preamble
2 Unlikely bankroller
3 Bucolic fairyland or shadowland?
4 The pied piper of lower Bavaria
5 Fellow workers in the truth
6 Hiding in cassocks from the long knives
7 Kirchenkampf
8 Traunstein idyll
9 Religious czar and two-way Kardinal
10 Did they resist intimidation?
11 Complete innocence or sexual continence
12 High interior exaltation
13 Digression- fools of fate
14 A contrast of two adolescents
15 Example to the German bishops
16 More dissolving battalions
17 Strange meeting if true
18 Frisch weht de Wind der Heimat zu
19 The moral fibre
20 Conflicting messages
Part Two 1951-2010
Damaged Leader of a Damaged Church: Five Years as Pope
21 Theology first, life second
22 The Panzer Kardinal
23 Dealing with Eros
24 September 12, 2006
25 The greatest drama of the pontificate
26 Year three
27 Chill winds: years four and five
28 If you keep quiet I won’t say anything
One
Preamble
Germans love their mountains. Vacations in the mountains, climbing and rambling, breathing in the pure air, admiring the spectacular views, is a pleasure countless millions have savoured and enjoyed.
In 1979 Wilfred T, an eleven year old Westphalian boy from the industrial town of Essen, was excited by taking a holiday in the mountains with his loving and trusted priest, Father Peter Hullermann, thirty-one years of age.
‘Hully’, as he was affectionately known by his boys, had been serving in his Essen parish since his ordination. He was noted for his accessibility, his humour, and his ability to connect: ‘touchy-feely’ was how his parishioners might have thought of him, in literal translation, they said, ‘a priest to touch’. He possessed the charisma to create a young church, and pass on his love of liturgy in enduring fashion to a young generation. In fact, he had the qualities of an ideal confessor in the post-Vatican II years of the 1960s and 1970s, dedicated to the Christian community spirit and love, and opening out the church to the modern world.
One night of their mountain sojourn, after Hully had encouraged and cajoled his young charge to join him in a few drinks, he took Wilfred to his bedroom, locked the door, stripped him and then—his own father confessor—forced him to perform oral sex.
The abuse came to light. The church authorities, responding to accusations of molestation by Hullermann of Wilfred and the children of two other families, mollified the parents or otherwise gained their silence, and suspended Hullermann. They sent him 500 kms away–so far that no one should hear about it— to Munich in Bavaria, where he came under the jurisdiction of Joseph Ratzinger, Archbishop of Munich and Freising.
Here he was placed under the care of a psychoanalyst, Werner Huth, who demanded as a condition of his treatment he should stop drinking alcohol, have a friend to keep an eye on him, and never again be put in a situation to interact with children. As Hullermann refused to believe there was anything wrong with him, Huth placed him in group therapy. The psychoanalyst believed he could not be cured, but could learn to redirect his sexual desires.
But shortly afterwards, ‘within days’, on assurances he would no longer have children in his care, Hullermann was returned on the order of Ratzinger’s deputy, Vicar General Gerhard Grüber, to clerical duties. From February 1980 to the end of August 1982 he practised unrestricted pastoral care in a Munich parish.
Grüber took full responsibility for this, saying Archbishop Ratzinger did not know, However the New York Times (23/3/10) reported it had proof Ratzinger was copied into a memo stating ‘Hullermann would be returned to pastoral work “within days”‘. This contradicts later denials, and the pope’s dismissal that this, and media outrage over other such cases, was ‘silly gossip’.
In late 1982 Hullermann was moved on to the parish of Grafing, and from 1984 began teaching high schoolchildren six hours a week, even though there was some vague mention of the ‘previous proceedings’. Less than two years on a court convicted him of sexually abusing minors (this time it was not specified how), gave him an 18 month suspended sentence, five years of probation, and fined him 4,000 marks. The court ordered psychotherapy , which he resumed with Werner Huth.
This was not the end. From Grafiing he moved to Garching an der Alz where he served for 21 years as curate, chaplain, and administrator in various institutions. Then he made a sudden, unaccountable departure marked by public celebration with brass band and the firing of salutes, which suggested the church’s insistence he had not offended since 1986 was far from the truth, but also that he was so popular he could get away with it. He moved and took up another post in the parish of the Bavarian spa Bad Tölz.
Father Hullermann’s history would never have been revealed but for a bizarre incident. On Sunday 15 March 2010 he was celebrating mass in Bad Tölz, where in 1945 Joseph Ratzinger, as a captured 18 year old German prisoner-of-war, had been detained in a POW holding camp. Hully was again engaged in parish duties as once more a popular and much feted pastor.
In his homily he made reference in general and vague terms to the abuse scandals both of a physical and sexual kind, now dominating German and world headlines. A young parishioner whose marriage he was shortly due to celebrate stood up in his pew and began to shout about the priest’s past secret. He stepped down, left, and went into hiding. Father Rupert Frania, in charge of the Bad Tölz parish, reported he knew nothing of Hullermann’s previous history of sexual abuse: ‘they should have told me before’ he said.
But the news of Ratzinger’s involvement as Munich primate on his home ground, and then, after 1981, as papal watchdog in the Vatican with the specific task of dealing with child rape, widened world media attention on the case.
It followed on many other recent cases brought or dragged to light (some 300 in all in Germany, as well as Ireland, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands and the United States). The most horrific of these was that of the deaf Father Lawrence Murphy, the Milwaukee priest accused of molesting some 200 helpless deaf boys from 1950 to 1975.Two Wisconsin bishops urged the Vatican to prosecute Murphy, but this never happened. Eventually, years later, the deaf community demanded justice. The trial went ahead in 1997, but Ratzinger halted it on compassionate grounds because Murphy had fallen ill. He died in 1998. This new case of abuse emerged in sensational headlines, such as ‘Infallible Pope turns blind eye to deaf boy molestation.’
In this and the Hullermann case the point made against the church was that the pope and the hierarchy of his choice, which surrounded and protected him, believed that the crime of bringing these repeated crimes into the public domain was actually worse than the acts committed by the perpetrators against the minors. Effective compassion towards the victims had been missing, and the heads of senior figures involved had failed to roll.
Ratzinger, as Vatican prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (once the Inquisition), had sent, in May 2001, to every Catholic bishop the directive to keep inquiries into child abuse behind closed doors, and secrete the evidence of such abuse perpetrated by a cleric on a minor as confidential for up to twelve years after the victim reached the age of 18. To insist upon such a closed system of jurisdiction, to be enforced upon pain of excommunication, was only too evocative of the system of justice operated and supported by professed Catholics in his youth too. His later, much quoted phrase, runs thus: ‘Cases of this kind are subject to the pontifical secret’. It seemed therefore that disclosure of the offence was actually worse than the offence itself.
At this same time, in 2001, Ratzinger’s letter was co-signed by Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, now Ratzinger’s deputy, who in early 2003 said in an interview, ‘In my opinion, the demand that a bishop be obligated to contact the police in order to denounce [sic] a priest who had admitted the offence of paedophilia is unfounded.’
Grüber and Huth’s subsequent claims that Ratzinger knew nothing of Hullermann’s swift return to pastoral duties were unlikely to be true. The Rev Thomas Doyle, former employee of the Vatican nunciature in Washington and an early critic of the slow response dismissed these as ‘Nonsense. Pope Benedict is a micro-manager. He’s the old style. Anything like that would necessarily have been brought to his attention. Tell the vicar general to find a better line. What he’s trying to do, obviously, is protect the pope.’
This is far from being an isolated view. Meticulous attention to detail, as well as form, has always been the hallmark of Ratzinger the man. Bishop Kevin Dowling of Rustenburg commented on this in a recent talk in Cape Town. ‘The minutiae of Church life and prayer at the lower level are subject to authentification and examination being given by the highest level.’
Not only was he copied in on the memo, but Huth tells us he chaired the meeting at which therapy was decided upon. Sexual abuse by a junior priest on his watch should have been of burning concern to someone who had been present during the whole-scale massacre of innocence in his own childhood. Why did he not identify with the raped children in the three Essen families and say, ‘I want to know everything that happens to this priest and his victims. At all costs keep me informed’? Given the toxic nature of such crimes in the long term, and an awareness of the harm they cause to victims, he should have been haunted forever by what had happened to make sure it could never happen again.
Anyone who has studied Ratzinger and his methods of work would agree that the chorus of defence over Easter 2010 of the pope led by Secretary of State Bertone, that Ratzinger did not know, was later assigned to Rome and, when future allegations were made, had been in the Vatican for years, was as feeble as any defence put forward by a secular governments to cover scandal and corruption. In the United Kingdom we are only too aware of such whitewash and how its users operate.
The Vatican’s defence then turned into accusations that the press was waging a campaign against the pope, that the wave of attacks on the church was like anti-Semitism, and that the Vatican was ‘trying to turn the persecutors into victims’, as an eminent Rabbi noticed. Again, wasn’t this all too reminiscent of German ‘revisionism’ over the responsibility for Nazi crimes? And even, faintly, of the cries of the accused Nazi leaders during the Nuremburg Trials, who would always try to put the blame onto someone else in the chain of command, and failing that the Allied powers. But of what, exactly, can the pope be personally held guilty or accountable?
Now, as so many of these cases had come to light, Benedict was no longer on probation as pope. In his first years since his election in April 2005 he trod very carefully to give an impression that he was not the reactionary churchman that everyone expected. But, in his recent expressions of sorrow and regret, and his treatment of other explosive issues he has said too little, used weak ‘situational’ excuses, suggesting the fault does not always lies with the guilty. Those who supported him at first increasingly belonged to a rightwing, conservative axis of Bavarians and Italians he had advanced during his reign. For example, one of these, Walter Mixa, Bishop of Augsburg, blamed the scandals ‘at least partly [on] the sexual revolutions of the 1960s’, a patently absurd assertion [see Chapter 28]. Mixa ultimately was forced to resign, but Benedict registered displeasure at this He also complained at the treatment Cardinal Godfried Danneels of Belgium, who is suspected of being involved in a cover-up of sexual crimes committed earlier by the Bishop of Bruges. He publicly reprimanded a senior cardinal who accused a colleague of failing to act in another important case.
Mixa himself was being investigated by the Suedeutsche Zeitung for the allegedly brutal beating of inmates of both sexes, in Catholic institutions he visited, with carpet beaters, balled fists and sticks, in places where the bruising could be hidden. One victim, an Augsburg sales assistant, claimed she was struck at least ten times; five accusers officially notarised their statements.
In a further, related revelation, Benedict’s brother Georg, often described as the only person the pope was close to, admitted repeatedly slapping the pupils in the Bavarian choir school he directed. ‘I had a bad conscience about it,’ he said in an interview. Before hastily being withdrawn from public view, lest he say the wrong thing and embarrass his brother further, the eighty-six-year-old monsignor, said, ‘The problem of sexual abuse that has now come to light was never spoken of...Of course today one condemns such affairs’. A further phrase he used eerily echoed what Ratzinger had written about his family’s reaction to the Nazi takeover of Germany in the 1930s: ‘These things were never discussed’.
In the following pages we return to a time when similar double standards in more extreme operation were the rule rather than a series, defenders of the church argue, of unhappy exceptions which have dragged Pope Benedict and the Vatican into unprecedented disrepute and unpopularity.
Or did they, as a connected trend, reflect an emerging pattern which was deeply connected to Benedict’s own past and upbringing?
In the following pages we attempt to unravel this mystery and the man at the centre of it from the inside, and try to show how this past has formed his way of thinking and of feeling, and influenced his present governance of the Roman Catholic Church.
As Ms Wankerl, aged 61, a pensioner in Bad Tölz said in 2010 of the Father Hullermann case, ‘If you get divorced and remarry you can’t take holy communion, but someone convicted of molesting children can celebrate mass for the rest of his life’.
Two
Unlikely Bankroller
Our natures do pursue
Like rats that ravine down their proper bane
A thirsty evil, and when we drink we die.
Measure for Measure, I. ii
Spring 1919. In the late-eighteenth century, neo-Roman nunciature or embassy of the Roman Catholic Church in Munich the stick-thin archbishop, the Vatican’s legate or nuncio, forever gentle and pious, knelt at prayer in the chapel.
Aged forty-three, six feet tall, with beautiful tapering hands, large and luminous dark eyes, the pallor of his skin had an eerie transparent effect, as if projecting from the inside a cold, white flame. A Roman by birth, from a family of church lawyers, he had arrived in Munich two years earlier, and impressed the war-weary Bavarians with his vigorous efforts to organise relief.
But now the city was in turmoil. Law and order had broken down. Leftwing mobs were on the rampage in the fashionable districts. The rump Reichswehr, the regular force allowed by the peace treaty, stayed in their barracks. The 20,000 strong newly recruited Free Corps, a rightwing, paramilitary force of mainly demobbed soldiers, had not yet arrived on the scene, to restore order and carry out savage reprisal.
There was an unholy banging on the embassy door. On the steps outside stood a blood-thirsty, armed contingent of Red revolutionaries. They had already killed those who resisted, and had taken aristocrats from the racialist Aryan Thule Society as hostages.
Eugenio Pacelli, the papal ambassador, rose to his feet. He had a lavish domestic entourage, but no security guards. Sister Pasquelina, the beautiful South German Catholic nun who accompanied him everywhere, and became known as La Popessa (the popess) when Pacelli was later Pope Pius XII, the wartime pope, opened up. The revolutionaries stormed into the embassy. Some demanded car keys and straightaway stole the official vehicle.
Pacelli stood his ground and confronted the invaders. Haughty and dignified he spoke with calmness and courage, telling them they had broken diplomatic law. The leader stepped forward and pressed the barrel of a rifle against his chest. Pacelli reeled. He tottered on his feet. Pasquelina ran to his aid, shouting at the insurgents to leave him alone.
Ultimately the Communists left him unharmed, but he suffered a terrible collapse, the first of many nervous collapses. The invasion of his sanctuary by a Jewish-led Bolshevist mob produced a psychological wound from which he never fully recovered. It gave rise to blood-curdling nightmares from which he would awake screaming for the rest of his life.
§
Kurt Eisner, a middle-class, Jewish theatre critic from Munich’s bohemian Schwabing district, had brought mayhem to Munich the previous November, 1918. Released from Cell 70 in Stadelheim gaol after a sentence for organizing strikes to end the war, Eisner, short of stature, small, wire-rimmed spectacles perched on his nose, sporting a heavy grey beard, a black cloak, and huge broad-brimmed black felt hat in the style of Lenin, sneered at political convention.
Eisner wasn’t a Marxist but a way-out Democrat. When immediate social breakdown and anarchy threatened the Social Democratic Party’s control of Munich he organized a brass band and banners, summoned a crowd, exhorted it to occupy the army barracks, and seize the Bavarian State Parliament.
He met no resistance from the diminished defence force allowed by the Versailles treaty, and was endorsed both by the revolutionary Workers’ and the Soldiers’ Councils. Then, as leader, calling himself an Independent Social Democrat, and supported by the Majority and Independent Social Democrats, he proclaimed the Bavarian kingdom a Republic, the ‘People’s State’.
All sides condemned Eisner as a pacifist agitator, a Jew, a journalist, a bohemian and, worst of all, a Berliner. He had, even more nefariously and treacherously, published the secret and incriminating documents blaming the Germans for starting the war, collected by Felix Feuenbach who was his secretary. Food supplies dwindled because the Bavarian peasantry withheld their support, Eisner’s ‘government’ quickly foundered, while the Allied powers requisitioned the trains.
On 21 February 1919, Count Anton von Arco-Valley, an aristocrat and nineteen year old Munich student, shot Eisner twice at point-blank range in the street, killing him instantly. Murder and recrimination had followed, with huge demonstrations at Eisner’s funeral. Munich had sunk more and more into unregulated mob rule. While on paper there was a legitimate Bavarian government of Majority Social Democrats, it couldn’t command authority. The Workers and Soldiers’ Councils distributed arms, and then a Soviet-style putsch seemed in the offing. Writers such as the playwright Ernst Toller – ‘coffee house anarchists’ – proclaimed Munich University open to all applicants except those who studied history!
Armed clashes between the ‘Red Army’ and Social Democrats became frequent. More militant Communists squashed the airy-fairy idealists to proclaim a Bolshevik Bavaria. They contacted Lenin in Moscow. ‘Have you nationalized the banks yet?’ inquired Lenin politely (and sensibly). They followed his advice, and took hostages from the aristocracy and middle class. The ‘Goddess Reason’ reigned in Munich’s Catholic churches; priests, of an early ‘Liberation Theology’ persuasion, joined the insurrection. Soon they were training a ‘Red Army’ of 20,000; many were boarded in churches and monasteries, where weapons were stored. It seemed Bavaria was about to spearhead the Bolshevisation of Europe.
Pacelli had, before his shocking experience, already visited a leading Bolshevik faction which had supported Eisner’s seizure of power and made their headquarters in the former Bavarian royal palace. He wrote to his Vatican superior, in order to keep the pope in Rome informed, that what he found was ‘chaotic, the filth completely nauseating...’ Once the home of a king, it resounded ‘with screams, vile language, profanities...An army of employees was dashing to and fro, waving bits of paper, and in the midst of al l this, a gang of young women, of dubious appearance, Jews like all the rest of them, hanging around in all the offices with provocative behaviour and suggestive smiles...’This female gang’s boss was Levine’s mistress, a young Russian woman, a Jew and a divorcee, while Levine, aged about 30 or 35, was also ‘Russian and a Jew, Pale, dirty, with vacant eyes, hoarse voice, vulgar, repulsive, with a face that is both intelligent and sly.’ In this and from other statements and actions Pacelli displayed a physical repulsion which re-inforced an inherited anti-Judaism present in his heart and in his theological conditioning. It was to pave the way for his resistance in the future to denounce, or even admit the persecution of, and the atrocities committed against, Jewish people.
When he had recovered from his nervous collapse Pacelli quickly took a hand in helping to re-assert full Catholic and legitimate democratic authority in the Bavarian capital. But there was an even stranger and darker sequel to the break-in at his embassy.
Some weeks later, unannounced, an unknown young man rang the embassy door bell and asked to see the papal legate. He had, he told the gatekeeper Pasquelina, a letter of introduction from no less a personage than General Erich Ludendorff, a hero of the Great War. He was admitted at once.
Pasquelina ushered the respectably dressed young man into Pacelli’s study, and stood outside to listen to what followed. He told Pacelli he was an Austrian by birth who had fought in a Bavarian regiment and been decorated for bravery. Recently he had served as a Bundingsoffizier, an instructor to combat dangerous ideas among the rank and file. And now he was forming a new party called the Deutsche Arbeiter Partei (German worker’s party), or DAP. They badly needed money.