_The Priests_
One of the most significant books that was given to me during my recent
tour of Europe was a bound volume containing the names and addresses
of 2,700 expelled priests who were uprooted from their parishes in
1945, 1946 and 1947. None of these Catholic priests had been accused
of crimes of any sort. Most of them were simple pastors of country
and city parishes whose aim was the spiritual welfare and eventual
salvation of their flocks. Many of them had suffered at the hands of
the Gestapo.
And yet, when the theory of mass expulsion on a racial basis was
applied to such areas as Pomerania, East Prussia, Danzig, and Silesia
and the Sudetenland, these men of God were thrust from their parish
churches, from their rectories, and joined the nearly 12 million
expellees who trekked through the heart of Europe as uprooted pilgrims
of the night. And they still are joined to the lot of the disinherited,
for they live among them in daily service, in daily sacrifice.
The book to which I refer has been printed by the Seminary for expelled
seminarians located in Koenigstein, near Frankfurt. It lists the former
dioceses of the priests, their date of ordination, and their present
whereabouts in Western Europe. We see in this book listings of priests
ranging from young men who were just ordained to priests ninety years
of age.
Some of the priests as members of such religious orders as the
Franciscans and Augustinians were generally accepted by the houses of
their orders in Western Germany. The vast majority of these expelled
priests were simple pastors and they have gone out among their people
who were expelled with them. Their life differs little from that of any
other homeless expellee.
I have known a priest to live in a single room of an old house, so as
to be near the former slave labor barracks where the expellees from
Silesia manage to exist. I have seen pictures taken by Caritas of
the dwellings of other expelled priests; one priest from the Ermland
diocese was able to get a little room in the attic of a resort hotel,
a room which serves not only as his study, his sleeping quarters, and
garage for his only means of transport, a bicycle, but also as his
parish office where he receives his parishioners.
HOMELESS PRIESTS—THEIR FLOCKS DISPERSED
One of the burdens that lie most heavily on these expelled priests is
the knowledge that their former parishioners are scattered throughout
all the zones of Germany. These driven people had no choice as to
their destination; or to be exact, they had no destination. To cite
an example, Father Johannes Preuss, now located in Neumuenster,
Schleswig-Holstein, reported that he had a parish of 700 souls in
Nossberg, East Prussia. When the expulsion came, trains took his
parishioners in different directions and he has received word from
them from all four zones of Germany. The largest number of his
parishioners landed in the Russian zone. He does not know how many of
his parishioners were deported eastward to slave labor in Siberia, nor
how many died on the roads and in the cattle cars during the expulsion.
He does know that exhaustive efforts to find out how many of his
parishioners are still alive resulted in a total of 450 out of 700.
Father Preuss also gave us another significant figure: out of the ten
priests fulfilling their ministry in the area of Gutstadt, (where his
parish was located), seven were killed or deported and only three live
to labor among their expelled flocks in Western Germany. The particular
diocese of Ermland from which Father Preuss comes suffered possibly
more than any other diocese in the loss of its priests and the loss of
its faithful. About 40 per cent of its priests are dead or missing.
For all the inhabitants of East Prussia, Catholic and Protestant, the
total of dead or missing comes to 1 out of every 5 people. This is
the cost that is paid by human beings in general, the guilty and the
innocent, the aged and the children, for mass expulsion.
A PRIEST IN SIBERIA
One of the priests of this Ermland diocese is now in the United
States on a mission on behalf of the St. Boniface Society, the Church
Extension organization of Germany. This young Ermland priest has told
us in a calm, gentle way of his experience—experiences which are true,
unfortunately, for other priests, and men and women.
Because of his opposition to Nazism, Father Gerhard Fittkau was
forbidden to teach by the Gestapo, though he had earned his doctorate
in theology and was needed as a professor in a Catholic High School.
He was appointed as the young pastor of the parish of the Nativity of
Our Lady, in Suessenberg, East Prussia. He had in his pastoral care a
little flock of 91 families, numbering 460 people. They were in the
main, the owners of well-kept farms, hard-working and orderly, but not
rich—part of a Catholic enclave in a prosperous Protestant area.
He was there in January, 1945, when the Russian advancing army almost
completely encircled the area of Central Ermland in East Prussia.
Though tempted to flee, in the wake of many who had managed to get out
before the arrival of the Soviet troops, Father Fittkau found in the
sacrifice of the Mass, the strength to remain, though it might mean
death or deportation. Every day he celebrated High Mass, and all the
parishioners who remained, together with evacuees from other villages,
prayed with great faith and devotion. The confessional was busy as
never before. The instruction for Holy Communion was speeded up so that
the little ones could also receive the Holy Eucharist; the Sacrament
was carried to the old and the sick. For so many it was a viaticum,
explains Father Fittkau, not only for the aged and ill, but for the
young and the strong.
“When I consider,” says Father Fittkau, “all that God’s grace must have
accomplished in those days of extreme distress, the price we had to
pay was surely not too high. Could our parish ever have been led by
any other means to such trust in God, to such resignation, and to such
love?”
When the Soviet army entered Suessenberg, girls and women were
immediately rounded up and taken away for “peeling potatoes for
the soldiers.” They returned after being abused by the army men,
broken-spirited and infected by disease. Father Fittkau was able to
protect a group of several women and girls and a Grey Sister from such
violation, though he came close to being executed for his deed.
Twenty-five villagers were murdered, including a seventy-three-year-old
sacristan, the sixty-five-year-old church bell-ringer, the
twenty-three-year-old girl organist, and four other girls under
twenty-five. Six priests of the surrounding area were executed.
After burying the bodies of his dead parishioners in the hard-frozen
earth, Father Fittkau had to register at the newly set-up Red Army
headquarters. There, he met three elderly priests who had been herded
in from the neighborhood. The four of them were sent as a special
detail to go out into the fields and gather for a common grave the
bodies of about fifty murdered civilians—bodies already partly mauled
by animals. Before their task was fully done, the priests were arrested
and marched by the Soviet Secret Police to a cellar in a neighboring
town. Many civilians were locked up in other cellars of the same town
and were not allowed out of the improvised cells even for any of
nature’s needs. (This was a common Soviet prison procedure.)
Finally in March of 1945, two months after the arrival of the Red Army,
the prisoners knew their sentence—the deportation to Siberia for slave
labor. About 2,500 men and women from the area were sent off at the
same time. Forty-eight other men and boys, ranging in age from 14 to
73, were in the dark, ice-cold car with Father Fittkau for a 21 day
journey, which included stops at Moscow and Kotlas for delousing. The
journey continued until they reached a forced labor camp near Pechora
in the Tundra near the Arctic Ocean. When the freight car was opened at
the destination, seven of the forty-nine men had already died. Father
Fittkau staggered with the men into a large compound, filled only with
bare, snow-covered barracks. Around the compound was a ten-foot wooden
fence. Four large watch towers stood at each corner of the camp. It
seemed as though most of the inmates of this compound had died, but the
few who were left were led off shortly after Father Fittkau arrived.
They were Poles and Ukrainians who had been deported to Siberia in 1940
and 1941, when between one and one-half and two million innocent men,
women and children of Polish nationality were brutally uprooted from
their homes for forced labor.
“They were ragged, prematurely old, pitiful human creatures,” says
Father Fittkau, “the remnants of those poor people who had been removed
to this forced labor district when Stalin shared Poland with Hitler.”
Father Fittkau worked with other men, and many deported women with
shaved heads and men’s garments, on the earth works and timber-works
for a canal. One of his only sources of comfort was the companionship
of a Protestant minister. Together, they tried to force their worn
out minds to hold on to spiritual realities while men, reduced to a
vegetative existence, fell and died in the snow around them.
At the end of the first month, a quarter of all the inhabitants of the
compound had already died. The unfortunates who could not work, but
also could not die, were sent farther north to a so-called barracks
hospital, where little could be done for them in the way of medical
aid. They were observed by a specialist, however, for the signs of
degeneration due to lack of vitamins and general malnutrition.
With his legs and feet swollen from weakness and hunger, and his entire
body marked with abscesses and eczema, Father Fittkau waited for death,
but unexpectedly, on the Feast of Our Lady of Ransom, he was freed, and
added to the first batch of freed laborers that would be returned to
Germany.
Recovering in a half-destroyed hospital in Berlin, he learned of
the expulsions from the East. The flock of his little parish of Our
Lady’s Nativity were now homeless wanderers, mostly in the Soviet Zone
of Germany. The poor little village had been scattered, says Father
Fittkau, “from the Urals and uttermost reaches of Siberia, to the
Rhine.” From letters and reports, he estimates that scarcely half of
his former parishioners are still alive.
Father Fittkau stresses that this story of the dispersal of a parish is
nothing exceptional—but rather the typical story of the atomization of
thousands of parishes since the end of the war.
As soon as he had recovered, Father Fittkau was placed in charge of the
Chancery of the late Bishop Maximilian Kaller. In this work, he was
thrust into the heart of all Expellee problems since Bishop Kaller was
named by the Holy Father as Bishop of all Expelled Catholics in Germany.
Father Fittkau wants to make known the sufferings of the priests of the
disinherited, so that special help can be sent to them to aid them in
their holy and heroic tasks. He wants to make known, too, his strong
feeling for the reconciliation of all Christians, especially former
enemies, who have suffered so much that they should have no hatred
left—only love and compassion.
UPROOTED CATHOLICS WITHOUT CHURCHES
One of the least understood problems concerning the expellees is
that of the Catholics who were expelled into the Protestant areas of
Germany, where there are neither churches, parish centers, nor schools.
Here the task of the homeless priest is made a thousand times more
difficult, because he must find places to say Mass and he must find
ways of getting to his poverty-stricken flock. They cannot come to him
over great distances because they lack means of transportation and
money. They lack strength often to walk the miles necessary to reach
the town center where Mass is being said. There are three Catholic
dioceses in Germany which have received in the last few years, hundreds
of thousands of destitute Catholics whose spiritual and material needs
are overwhelmingly great. The two dioceses of Osnabrueck and Hildesheim
in the north of Germany found their Catholic populations increased
almost overnight by more than a million Catholics. These dioceses,
which are located in the predominantly Protestant areas of Germany and
which have received so tremendous an influx of Catholics, are known as
the Diaspora dioceses. The diocese of Paderborn was also affected in
this way as well, as we will make clear later.
The diocese of Osnabrueck extends all the way up to the Danish border
and includes within its area the entire province of Schleswig-Holstein
which juts out into the Baltic and North Sea. Schleswig-Holstein has
been since the 16th century an almost wholly Protestant area. As a
result of the mass expulsion, the population of this province rose
from 1,500,000 to 2,700,000. The Lutheran expellees from East Prussia,
Pomerania and Silesia came into an area where their spiritual needs
could be met in some measure by the local Lutheran churches and
Lutheran Pastors. The thousands upon thousands of Catholic expellees
found themselves living not only in material misery in wooden barracks
and in rooms in back of barns, but in the deepest spiritual misery
because of the lack of the consolations of religion. Bishop Kaller
immediately stationed more than sixty-five expelled priests in the area
of Schleswig-Holstein. These devoted men were helped by the Lutheran
Pastors who gave them the use of their Lutheran Churches to say Mass,
and by local public authorities who allowed them to say Mass and to
give instructions in public schools on Sundays and in the evenings. The
Bishop of Osnabrueck has also transferred some of his best equipped
priests to this area to help in the organization of new parishes.
Several wooden churches and parish centers have already been erected.
The efforts of the priests to cover great tracts of territory are
supported by the work of selfless women, who trudge on foot, or go by
bicycle, to teach Catechism in the most remote settlements. A group
of young women have even grouped themselves into a new society to
meet the needs of the times. In a barracks on a lonely section of
Schleswig-Holstein, they pray and study to prepare themselves for their
apostolate as pastors’ helpers.
I sent one of the delegates of War Relief Services up to
Schleswig-Holstein to make a special survey of the struggles and needs
of these priests, and among other reports, I received one on the
typical Sunday of an expellee priest in Schleswig-Holstein.
It might be well to mention in this connection that the Diaspora area
of the Lutheran expellees is in Bavaria and Southern, predominantly
Catholic, Germany. Here the Lutheran homeless find themselves without
churches. Their pastors often use Catholic halls and establishments to
give the ministrations of their belief to Lutheran expellees. One sees
them on their bicycles moving over the roads of Munich and the southern
German countryside on their visitations. I am sure that studies have
also been made of the struggles of these Pastors, but I would like to
present to you this living picture of a priest and a pastor, who in the
dark night of exile, tries to keep alive the light of faith.
ALMOST NEVER OFF HIS MOTORCYCLE
Father Francis Motzki, the report states, was an expellee from the
diocese of Ermland in East Prussia, who was sent in 1946 by Bishop
Kaller to care for the souls of the expellees in northwestern
Schleswig-Holstein.
He found a room in the town of Bredstedt. It is a little room which
contains besides his bed, his desk, his clothing, his work table, his
book case, and his parish supplies, a locked tabernacle on the wall
which contains the body and blood of the Lord of all the world. Father
Motzki works and eats and receives his local parishioners in this one
room. As there is no Catholic Church in the town of Bredstedt, he must
keep the Most Blessed Sacrament in this tabernacle so that he will be
ready to go to the sick and dying when called.
Catholic expellees are located in camps and villages all around
Bredstedt, and Father Motzki says Mass in eight different places and
gives religious instructions to children and young people in thirteen
places. Though he is well under forty, he looks like an older man. He
is almost never off the motorbike on which he commutes between the
various places where he gives instructions and visits his parishioners.
He has recently developed a serious kidney ailment but cannot curtail
his work for souls.
He has known great personal tragedy, since one of his sisters was
deported for slave labor in Siberia, in 1945, and was never heard from
again. A second sister was also deported, but was returned to Germany
in 1948. She rented a room in the same house, and prepares Father’s
meals and acts as housekeeper for his furnished room.
I came early one Sunday morning to the town of Bredstedt where Father
Motzki said his first Mass in the Lutheran Church at 7:45 in the
morning. He had a full congregation consisting solely of expellees.
Because there was a three-hour interval before his next Mass, Father
Motzki was allowed to take liquid refreshment—some hot coffee. After
his cup of coffee, Father Motzki set out for his second Mass station at
Lutjenholm. This was in a public school. When he arrived the women from
the nearby expellee barracks were already there and the teacher’s desk
was covered with clean linen and with fresh flowers for the celebration
of the sacrifice of love. Most of the congregation at this Mass were
grown-ups. Confessions, heard in the open hallway of the school,
preceded the Mass, which began at 11:30 o’clock.
Immediately after the second Mass, Father Motzki proceeded to Bargum
and arrived there in time to say his third Mass in a school at 1 P.M.
There were many camps in the vicinity, and the school room was crowded
with a congregation that consisted of more than half young people. The
clean linen and the flowers just picked from the fields were already
there, and one could see the joy with which these forsaken people
welcomed the priest of God. At this Mass Father Motzki delivered a
special sermon for the children and young people, because a large
number of them were to be confirmed on the following Thursday by the
Bishop of Osnabrueck. The confirmation of these and all the other
children of the entire area would take place in the Lutheran Church of
Bredstedt.
Father Motzki reminded the children what confirmation meant as the
strengthening of the faith of the Christian to meet the trials of the
world and to resist sin. He explained to them the entire ceremony,
including the making of the sign of the Cross with the chrism, and the
slap on the cheek by the Bishop as a reminder to each child that it is
his duty to accept trials for Christ.
CHILDREN WHO KNEW CHRIST’S CROSS
“It may be,” said Father Motzki, “that I have not been able because of
the difficulties of our life here to instruct you adequately in all
the aspects of the faith for your Confirmation. It may be that there
are many points about Catholic doctrine that I could have taught you
more thoroughly, my beloved children. When the Bishop makes the sign
of the Cross first with the holy oil on your forehead and then over
you, I know that you will understand what he means by it. You know so
well, though you are only children, what the Cross means in our life of
every day. You are homeless, you are exiled from your farms and your
home towns. You must go out without shoes, and you have known terrible
hunger. You understand all these things. You know the way of the Cross!
“And so, when the Bishop, who represents to you Christ himself, makes
the Cross over you, you will know from your own sufferings, not from my
teaching, what Christ meant by the Cross.
[Illustration:
Confession in the school hall.
]
[Illustration:
“Oh Mary, help us all, out of the depth of our need.”
]
[Illustration:
Though he may be hungry and tired, the Expellee priest is a tower of
strength to the people whom he visits in their barracks homes.
]
[Illustration:
Father’s fourth Sunday Mass in a Lutheran Church.
]
“When the Bishop slaps each one of you on the face to remind you to
be willing to suffer for Christ’s sake, you must remember to offer up
willingly all the suffering of your own bodies and of your family for
Christ. He took His Cross and offered His life for each one of us.”
After the Mass the children and young people joined in singing the
beautiful and touching hymn of Maria Hilf. As they sang, “Oh Mary, help
us all, out of the depth of our need,” it was clear from their faces
and from their sad voices that they knew what the Cross really meant,
and also what it meant to accept the trials of the world.
There were tears in the eyes not only of the Expellees but also of the
War Relief Service delegate as this hymn was sung.
NO FOOD BEFORE EVENING
Father Motzki then visited some of the sick and aged in the nearby
barracks. I could not help but notice as we drove along throughout
the day, following Father’s route, how rich and lovely was the
countryside, with its flat, well-cared-for fields, fine barns, and neat
little cottages. Everywhere we saw the magnificent cattle for which
the area is famous. Every now and then, we would pass an impressive
establishment, owned by a larger landowner, and we would admire the
tremendous, solid brick barns. By contrast with all this comfort and
solidity, the clusters of unpainted, greyish-brown wooden barracks in
which so many of the expellees lived seemed even more desolate and
forlorn.
After his visits, Father took to the road again and headed for the
town of Langenhorn, where at 3 o’clock in the afternoon he said his
fourth and last Mass of the day in a Lutheran Church, kindly lent to
him by the minister. The main aisles of the church were filled and many
people went to communion, particularly younger people and children.
Again Father Motzki gave his sermon on confirmation and again the
voices of children who knew the misery of separation and homelessness
filled the building.
At 6 o’clock that evening Father Motzki was back in Bredstedt and
sitting down to his first solid food of the day.
TO SAVE A WHOLE GENERATION
You who read may think that this case is very unusual. It is not
at all. Other priests go through the same heart-breaking schedule,
covering regularly six thousand three hundred Mass stations in Lutheran
churches, movie houses and schools, only because they want to save a
whole generation for the Church. Priests know that men and women and
children who have been deprived of everything may become bitter and
cynical if they are not given the consolations of religion. It is
only to prevent the loss of a whole generation in the Diaspora areas,
that the expellee priests, like true apostles and true pilgrims, wear
out their strength in saying Masses and giving instructions over wide
areas. In the province of Schleswig-Holstein alone there are 341 Mass
stations for the expellees where 83 priests say Mass as often as is
humanly possible. Already young priests have died under the strain of
this schedule. This is an area where Catholic relief from America
can play a vital role in saving for the Church a whole generation, a
generation of the uprooted, of the disinherited.
Our Lord has put so often into our hands here in the United States the
bounty that we can share so that these children, so deeply wounded by
separation and suffering, may not also be disinherited from the Kingdom
of the Lord.