Stories From the Other Side: The Impact of Faith in a German Town During WWII (continued)
I first heard the term in May 2005, from a glib Catholic woman recounting wartime memories of Fr. Viktor in breathless torrents of German. "Die Schwarzen," my translator, Fr. Gregor Lenzen C.P., explained in his characteristically serene tone, "is a term in our culture, referring to devout Catholics. In English it translates into 'the blacks,' referring to the black robes of the Catholic clergy." Their personal stories chipped away at a black-white wall of preconceptions I'd made about Germans living in the Third Reich, all constructed from indelible history lessons focused on the Holocaust. Certainly the gritty facts are incontestable—Adolf Hitler seduced a despairing nation and perpetrated the death of millions. In the 1920s and early 30s, even the Catholic Church enthusiastically supported a regime that extolled the virtues of prolific, healthy families and promised to defend its populace from what the Church considered a greater evil—the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. As Nazism's influence flourished throughout Germany, raising "Blood and Soil" to an idolatrous level, the country's Catholics found themselves besieged between rival religions—one founded on the Cross, the other on a Swastika that demanded blind obedience from its citizens. In Schwarzenfeld, inspirational figures and stories arise from ordinary people clinging to their faith in the Cross.
Pauline Dirrigl and Anna Thanner were among the first Schwarzen to emerge from history's pages. "I knew Paula; she was the real miracle worker for the priests," one eyewitness confides, her memories wrapping flesh and faith around a name I've only seen printed in the Miesberg church's chronicles. "She was a devoted Catholic and a poor soul in many ways. She knew the meaning of suffering because she had her own cross to bear—she was deaf, and [was sometimes ridiculed by others for this disability]. Early each morning her kitchen stove was lit, and huge pots as one might find in a restaurant were filled with meals in progress, which she prepared for her whole family, and also for Frs. Viktor and Böminghaus [living in the church's sacristy. They had no other food source because they had been forbidden to use the monastery garden where they had previously grown their own food]. Altogether, Paula cooked for thirteen people each day… all this she did, year after year. In the hottest summer and the coldest, snowy winter her maid Anna walked up the Miesberg and delivered the food… She and other farm women were often seen walking up the hill to the church with baskets covered by their black shawls, delivering food to the Fathers."
While impending war loomed over Europe, Schwarzenfeld's Catholic population witnessed a gradual erosion of religious culture and freedom. Nazi leaders deposed Herr Georg Bauer, a Catholic Bürgermeister (town mayor) who fervently supported the Passionists' decision to open a monastery in Schwarzenfeld despite prevailing laws that prohibited the Church from establishing new institutions in Germany. Only months after construction was complete, the Nazis appointed a party loyalist in his place. Nuns were banished from Catholic schools; the fanatical instructors who replaced them instilled unquestioning loyalty to the Führer within the malleable young minds of their students. Parents answering an ominous knock on the door late at night were often hauled away to a local police station, where authorities relentlessly interrogated them for hours at a time over anti-Nazi comments uttered in a child's presence. History records that the outspoken Norbert Gindele, a Miesberg church parishioner and steadfast friend of Fr. Viktor, refused to reticently tolerate the disturbing events unfolding around him.
"Our father was always being observed by the Nazis," Norbert Gindele's daughters explained during their interview in May 2005. "Often he was called and interrogated for something he had said against them. People told our mother, 'Don't let him speak anymore, because he is putting himself in terrible danger!' And he certainly would have been captured or put into forced labor, but the Nazis needed him as a baker. [When government orders drafted all able-bodied men to serve on the Western Front, he was granted a deferment to remain in Schwarzenfeld and run his bakery, which provided the only source of bread for 500 local women and children]. He was a close friend of the Paters."
When I inquire about contention between Nazism and Catholicism in Schwarzenfeld, Gindele's daughters describe a chilling incident of persecution I'd never expected to hear from a German citizen. "Shortly before the end of the war," they said, "there was a time where the Nazis visited our house very late at night. They were standing out in the street, shouting, demanding that our father come out because they wanted to hang him. We were small children… we remember hiding in our house in the darkness with our mother—our father was sick in the hospital. Our house was such that the bakery shop was on the first floor, and the living quarters were on the second floor. The Nazis tried knocking on the doors of our neighbors' homes, asking for a ladder so that they could reach us through the windows, but no one answered. We stayed quiet until they left. After the war, we discovered that the Nazis had a 'Black List' of people to be observed or hanged for speaking against the Reich. We learned that our father was second on that list."
The Gindele daughters revealed that their mother Maria, while less prone to engage in confrontation, was an equally devout woman who encountered moral dilemmas and resolved them with quiet action. "During the war, there were foreign laborers working throughout Schwarzenfeld," they explained, referring to Russian and Polish men captured by German troops, and sent to the home front to perform labor-intensive tasks ordinarily reserved for men. Draped in threadbare garb branded with shoulder patches and a bold 'P' for 'Pole' or 'R' for 'Russian,' they worked in Schwarzenfeld's corn and wheat fields, or in the Buchtalwerks (a ceramic tile factory) by day. At night, they returned to boarding houses or barracks located outside the town's borders. "During the war, everyone needed ration stamps in order to get food," explained the two elderly women seated across from me in the Miesbergkloster's recreation room. "These laborers had their own stamps, and so they came also into the bakery shop. At times they would run out of stamps, and they were starving after all the work they were forced to do. Our mother had compassion on them… she pretended to cut stamps and then would give them bread for nothing in return. [An element of danger existed in performing this act, however, because Nazi officials meticulously examined the Gindele bakery's records to ensure that they collected an appropriate number of stamps for the supplies they used]."
In April 1945, after enraged American soldiers discovered the mass grave haunting Schwarzenfeld's borders, Maria Gindele's generosity was unexpectedly repaid by one of the people least likely to defend a German citizen—a liberated Russian laborer who frequented her bakery. He stood in the doorway and blocked American soldiers barging into her bakery and homestead, intent upon fulfilling their orders: round up all German men in the town. "Here there are good people living," the Russian assured them in broken German, "you don't have to come in here." His clothing and lean, rugged appearance convinced the astounded Americans, who departed and moved along methodically to neighboring homes.
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