Jasenovac

Home > News & Events > More Evidence of Catholic Church's Involvement in the Holocaust Revealed...

News & Events

German Church Says It Used Nazi Forced Labor
Reuters
12 July 2000
By Mark John

BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany's Protestant Church formally acknowledged Wednesday that it used forced laborers during the Third Reich and pledged to pay into a compensation fund for Nazi victims. The admission came after revelations that Berlin church parishes set up a forced labor camp during World War Two from which they took mainly central and eastern European workers for tasks such as grave-digging. ``The Evangelical (Protestant) Church and its Social Services Agency employed forced laborers,'' church council president Manfred Kock said in a statement. ``This was complicity in a regime based on force and removed from the rule of law. We accept this guilt,'' he said. The church and its social services arm, the Diakonisches Werk, said it would pay 10 million marks ($4.9 million) into a fund for surviving victims around the world recently set up by the German state and business. Along with the Roman Catholic Church, the Evangelical Church is one of the two main denominations in Germany. Both were subject to serious oppression under the Hitler regime. Both churches have acknowledged individual cases of local parish leaders drawing on the vast army of forced laborers drafted in from across Europe to aid the Nazi war effort, be it in munitions factories or as housemaids. The admission of guilt drew praise but raised questions as to why it had taken so long. Stain On Church Past ``The bitter truth remains that it took the church 55 years to admit this dark stain on its past,'' said Hartwig Berger of the Greens party, junior partners in the ruling coalition. ``We urge the Catholic church also to make payment reflecting its yearly income,'' he added, referring to the substantial assets of the two main Christian denominations. A spokesman for the Catholic Church said that while individual cases had come to light where it may have employed forced laborers, it had no plans at present to contribute to the compensation fund. As part of Adolf Hitler's crackdown on the Christian churches, leading clergy critical of the regime were arrested and in some cases perished in concentration camps. Others were made to sign personal oaths of allegiance to Hitler as part of his grand scheme for a ``National Reich Church'' whose dogma would be redrawn around Nazi ideology. Recent research has suggested more widespread use of forced laborers by the churches than previously assumed. A leading Berlin clergyman confirmed Tuesday that 26Protestant and two Catholic church parishes had in 1943 set up a camp in central Berlin where around 100 forced laborers from east Europe and Russia were employed. ``It is astounding how systematically church parishes used forced labor to compensate for labor shortages, in this case for urgent work in graveyards,'' Berlin Bishop Wolfgang Huber said in a statement. He said church records kept on the camp contained few details but offered ``indirect evidence of the undignified working and living conditions'' experienced by laborers there. Prompted by legal threats against its leading firms by representatives of over a million surviving forced laborers around the world, Germany and its industry agreed last year to set up a 10-billion-mark ($4.86 billion) compensation fund.