Sunday August 3, 1941. The Third Sermon of Bishop Von Galen.

Hitler's order authorizing Aktion T4.

On this day in 1941, Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen issued the third of his sermons directed at the offenses of the Nazi regime in Germany.  The sermons had come nearly one after another, and after this one he was placed under house arrest, where he would remain until the German defeat in the war.

The July 13 sermon, which we covered here, protested against the Nazi suppression of the churches. The July 20 sermon, which we unfortunately missed, noted that written protests to the government would be useless and boldly declared that Germany was being destroyed from within by the corruption it was experiencing, rather than by Allied bombs.

The final sermon condemned the Nazi genocide programs aimed at the mentally infirm.  Specifically, it targeted the Aktion T4 program which by this point was gassing the mentally infirm.  The program had brought a condemnation already from the Papacy, that having been issued in December 1940, but the nature of the program remained murky.

Thousands of copies of the sermon were distributed throughout Germany which made its existence widely known.  Prior to that, its existence was the topic of back door discussion and rumors, although it had not successfully been kept a secret, as noted.

The sermon resulted, as noted, in the arrest of the Bishop.  Local Nazi officials asked for his death, but the government abstained as it feared it would result in a revolt in Westphalia, his diocese.  Three Catholic Priests who had disseminated the sermon were executed by beheading. The Nazi government suspended the program and then ended it, but this was also associated with the transfer of many of its personnel to the Eastern Front as part of Operation Barbarossa.  Murders of the infirm continued on but made some efforts to camouflage what it was doing, which were largely unsuccessful, so that it was less obvious that it was executing people merely for suffering from genetic conditions.  Indeed, some medically conducted murders actually took place after the German surrender, as by that point the confusion associated with the overall collapse of Germany meant that they went unnoticed.

The Bishop was a partial inspiration for the small German student resistance movement, The White Rose Movement.

The Bishop was made a Cardinal after the war, but he did not live long after it, dying in 1946 at age 68.  After the war, he'd been vocal in his protests of Allied treatment of the German civilian population and condemned the rape of German women, which in the Soviet sector had been at an epic level.