The German branch of the Catholic Church has admitted its “complicity” in the Second World War, days before the 75th anniversary of the surrender of the Third Reich.
Clergymen have wrestled for decades with the church’s ambivalent position under 12 years of Nazi rule without stating clearly whether the institution as a whole had failed. Yet a new report from the council of Catholic bishops makes what one prelate described as a “confession of guilt”.
The document states: “Inasmuch as the bishops did not oppose the war with a clear ‘no’, and most of them bolstered the [German nation’s] will to endure, they made themselves complicit in the war. The bishops may not have shared the Nazis’ justification for the war on the grounds of