I had heard that the Nazis were most successful in the Protestant regions of Germany and most resisted in the Catholic regions (that was first expressed to me a couple of years ago by a long time high school teacher friend of mine in Aachen, Germany).
Now I have been seeing repeated and consistent evidence of this in my present research in the life of Joseph Ratzinger.
Bavarian Resistance
"[Bavaria's] Roman Catholic and separatist tendencies threatened to lead to serious opposition to the government set up at Berlin by Adolf Hitler (1933), but Bavaria acquiesced, with the other German states, in the loss of autonomy (1934)." The Columbia Encyclopedia In One Volume, New York 1947, "Bavaria".
Bishop Resistance
Consider the outspoken and Nazi detested resistance of the great German Prelates of the Catholic Church at that time.
- Cardinal Faulhaber (Freising-Munich)
- Bishop Preysing (Berlin)
- Bishop Blessed Clemens August Graf von Galen, (Munster)
- Archbishop Frings (Cologne)
Priest Resistance/Torture/Execution
Of the 2720 clergy at Dachau, 2579 (95%!) were Catholic priests (1034 there died)!
Catholic Intellectuals (in the highly anti-Catholic Protestant academic climate; n.b. "Catholica non leguntur")
And it was above all the age old Catholic intellectual and cultural heritage which was the greatest power to resist and respond to the violation of persons and social confusion caused by false ideologies. One key figure was Romano Guardini "the traditional glue that allowed Germany to find some peace and justice after the 12 years of evil under Hitler. Certainly, fewer Germans would have held as much cultural sway in the post-war world as did Guardini. Young Germans especially adored him (e.g. Ratzinger)." Bradley J. Birzer, "Romano Guardini and the Personality of Man".
Guardini taught that the Catholic liturgy is an antidote to rationalism and moralism; the Catholic Church--Body of Christ--is a safeguard against the godless extremes of communism and anarchic individualism.
"Guardini's Catholic message struck a chord with the non-Catholic world, earning him the chair of Philosophy of Religion and Catholic Weltanschauung at the very Protestant, and still largely anti-Catholic, University of Berlin." Christopher Shannon, "Romano Guardini: Father of the New Evangelization"
"[The relationship between faith and the world is a perennially timely Guardini theme]. Guardini saw the university above all as a place for seeking truth. The university can be so, however, only when it is free from all exploitation for political advantage or other ends...[May students refine their] sensibility to the Christian foundations of our culture and society." Pope Benedict XVI Address on Romano Guardini, 29 October 2010.
This same point is made by Ratzinger regarding grade school and high school education: that the formation in the Greek and Latin classics immunizes the mind from easy sectarian manipulation because of the universal world vision it provides. Cf. Milestones, 23-24.
Another extraordinary Bavarian hero of those days was The Blessed Rupert Mayer SJ. (+1945)
Conclusion
An undivided Catholic Germany could have never produced the Third Reich.
May that be a lesson for the Western world in the face of the present threat from the tyranny of The Islamic State.
The West needs to rediscover itself in Jesus Christ it's Lord and Builder (the Houses of Europe were all built by the Catholic Christian Faith in Jesus Christ), with all due respect to everyone else in the world and in the West. We respect everyone but we must boldly promote, cherish and defend our Christian heritage above all the rest, especially the Rock of it all: The Catholic Church!
"...Although the old order of Christendom no longer exists, we Christians are not a negligible minority, and every Christian, whatever his special vocation and technique, has a general interest in the Christian past and a common responsibility for the preservation of the inheritance of Christian culture." Christopher Dawson, The Historic Reality of Christian Culture. Greenwood Press: Westport Connecticut, 1960, p. 110.
"We must overcome the schism between religion and culture which began in the age of the Renaissance and Reformation and was completed by the Enlightenment and the Revolution. This schism is the great tragedy of Western culture. It must be solved if Christian culture is to survive. And the survival or restoration of christian culture involves not only the fate of our own people and our own civilization but the fate of humanity and the future of the world." Ibid., p. 113.
P.S. Most of the Protestant academia was Nazi! and pushed out Schlier who went and became Catholic! The quote below illustrates that fact regarding the Evangelical German academia of the time, from a 2003 address of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to the Pontifical Biblical Commission.
With this [Magisterial excessive caution of the first half of the 20th century], however, the fact that the opposite problem existed in Protestant theology was taken too little into consideration. This is clearly seen, for example, in the conference on the ecclesial responsibility of the student of theology, held in 1936 by Bultmann's great student, Heinrich Schlier, who later converted to Catholicism. At this time evangelical Christianity in Germany was involved in a battle for survival: the encounter between the so-called German Christians (Deutsche Christen), who, subjecting Christianity to the ideology of National Socialism, distorted its roots, and the Confessed Church (Bekennende Kirche).
In this context Schlier addressed these words to students of theology: "...Reflect a moment on what is better: that the Church, in a legitimate way and after careful reflection, remove from teaching a theologian of heterodox doctrine, or that the individual freely charges one or another teacher of heterodoxy and protects himself from him? It must not be thought that judging is eliminated when each is allowed to judge ad libitum. Here the liberal vision is consistent in affirming that no decision on the truth of a teaching can exist, that therefore every teaching has something of truth and that thus all teachings must be admitted in the Church. But we do not share this vision. This denies in fact that God truly made a decision among us...".
Those who recall that then a great number of the Protestant Theology Departments were almost exclusively in the hands of the German Christians, and that Schlier had to leave academic teaching for affirmations such as the one just cited, can become aware of the other side of this problematic as well.
P.S.S. The German Center Party was the Catholic political party which did have some effect in preserving as much as possible the freedom of thought in academia: e.g. the founding of chairs of Philosophy of Religion and Catholic Weltanschauung in the State Universities in which Roman Guardini was a shining star. Cf. The National Institute for the Renewal of the Priesthood "Who Was Romano Guardini?"