title: Wigner's friend

text: However, unless Wigner is considered in a "privileged position as ultimate observer", the friend's point of view must be regarded as equally valid, and this is where an apparent paradox comes into play: From the point of view of the friend, the measurement result was determined long before Wigner had asked about it, and the state of the physical system has already collapsed. When exactly did the collapse occur? Was it when the friend had finished their measurement, or when the information of its result entered Wigner's consciousness? As Wigner says, he could ask his friend, "What did you feel about the [measurement result] before I asked you?" The question of what result the friend has seen is surely "already decided in his mind", Wigner writes, which implies that the friend–system joint state must already be one of the collapsed options, not a superposition of them. Wigner concludes that the linear time evolution of quantum states according to the Schrödinger equation cannot apply when the physical entity involved is a conscious being.


title: Wigner's friend

text: According to physicist Leslie Ballentine, by 1987 Wigner had decided that consciousness does not cause a physical collapse of the wavefunction, although he still believed that his chain of inferences leading up to that conclusion were correct. As Ballentine recounts, Wigner regarded his 1961 argument as a , indicating that the postulates of quantum mechanics need to be revised in some way.


title: Wigner's friend

text: The various versions of the many worlds interpretation avoid the need to postulate that consciousness causes collapse – indeed, that collapse occurs at all.


title: Wigner's friend

text: Hugh Everett III's doctoral thesis Relative state' formulation of quantum mechanics" serves as the foundation for today's many versions of many-worlds interpretations. In the introductory part of his work, Everett discusses the "amusing, but "extremely hypothetical" drama" of the Wigner's friend paradox. Note that there is evidence of a drawing of the scenario in an early draft of Everett's thesis. It was therefore Everett who provided the first written discussion of the problem four or five years before it was discussed in "Remarks on the mind-body question" by Wigner, of whom it received the name and fame thereafter. However, Everett being a student of Wigner's, it is clear that they must have discussed it together at some point.


title: Wigner's friend

text: In contrast to his teacher Wigner, who held the consciousness of an observer to be responsible for a collapse, Everett understands the Wigner's friend scenario in a different way: Insisting that quantum states assignments should be objective and nonperspectival, Everett derives a straightforward logical contradiction when letting formula_2 and formula_1 reason about the laboratory's state of formula_7 together with formula_2. Then, the Wigner's Friend scenario shows to Everett an incompatibility of the collapse postulate for describing measurements with the deterministic evolution of closed systems. In the context of his new theory, Everett claims to solve the Wigner's friend paradox by only allowing a continuous unitary time evolution of the wave function of the universe. However, there is no evidence of any written argument of Everett's on the topic.


title: Wigner's friend

text: In many-worlds interpretations, measurements are modelled as interactions between subsystems of the universe and manifest themselves as a branching of the universal state. The different branches account for the different possible measurement outcomes and are seen to exist as subjective experiences of the corresponding observers. In this view, the friend's measurement of the spin results in a branching of the world into two parallel worlds, one, in which the friend has measured the spin to be 1, and another, in which the friend has received the measurement outcome 0. If then Wigner measures at a later time the combined system of friend and spin system, the world again splits into two parallel parts.


title: Wigner's friend

text: According to objective-collapse theories, wave-function collapse occurs when a superposed system reaches a certain objective threshold of size or complexity. Objective-collapse proponents would expect a system as macroscopic as a cat to have collapsed before the box was opened, so the question of observation-of-observers does not arise for them. If the measured system were much simpler (such as a single spin state), then once the observation was made, the system would be expected to collapse, since the larger system of the scientist, equipment, and room would be considered far too complex to become entangled in the superposition.


title: Wigner's friend

text: Relational quantum mechanics (RQM) was developed in 1996 by Carlo Rovelli and is one of the more recent interpretations of quantum mechanics. In RQM, any physical system can play the role of an observing system, to which any other system may display "facts" about physical variables. This inherent relativity of facts in RQM provides a straightforward "solution" to the seemingly paradoxical situation in Wigner's friend scenario: The state that the friend assigns to the spin is a state relative to himself as friend, whereas the state that Wigner assigns to the combined system of friend and spin is a state relative to himself as Wigner. By construction of the theory, these two descriptions do not have to match, because both are correct assignments of states relative to their respective system.


title: Wigner's friend

text: If the physical variable that is measured of the spin system is denoted by "z", where "z" takes the possible outcome values 0 or 1, the above Wigner's friend situation is modelled in the RQM context as follows: formula_2 models the situation as the before-after-transition


title: Wigner's friend

text: of the state of formula_7 relative to him (here it was assumed that formula_2 received the outcome "z" = 1 in his measurement of formula_7).


title: Wigner's friend

text: In RQM language, the fact "z" = 1 for the spin of formula_7 actualized itself relative to formula_2 during the interaction of the two systems.


title: Wigner's friend

text: A different way to model the same situation is again an outside (Wigner's) perspective. From that viewpoint, a measurement by one system (formula_2) of another (formula_7) results in a correlation of the two systems. The state displaying such a correlation is equally valid for modelling the measurement process. However, the system with respect to which this correlated state is valid changes. Assuming that Wigner (formula_1) has the information that the physical variable "z" of formula_7 is being measured by formula_2, but not knowing what formula_2 received as result, formula_1 must model the situation as


title: Wigner's friend

text: where formula_24 is considered the state of formula_2 before the measurement, and formula_26 and formula_27 are the states corresponding to formula_2's state when he has measured 1 or 0 respectively. This model is depicting the situation as relative to formula_1, so the assigned states are relative states with respect to the Wigner system. In contrast, there is no value for the "z" outcome that actualizes with respect to formula_1, as he is not involved in the measurement.


title: Wigner's friend

text: In this sense, two accounts of the same situation (process of the measurement of the physical variable "z" on the system formula_7 by formula_2) are accepted within RQM to exist side by side. Only when deciding for a reference system, a statement for the "correct" account of the situation can be made.


title: Wigner's friend

text: In the interpretation known as QBism, advocated by N. David Mermin among others, the Wigner's-friend situation does not lead to a paradox, because there is never a uniquely correct wavefunction for any system. Instead, a wavefunction is a statement of personalist Bayesian probabilities, and moreover, the probabilities that wavefunctions encode are probabilities for experiences that are also personal to the agent who experiences them. Jaynes expresses this as follows: "There is a paradox only if we suppose that a density matrix (i.e. a probability distribution) is something 'physically real' and 'absolute'. But now the dilemma disappears when we recognize the 'relativity principle' for probabilities. A density matrix (or, in classical physics, a probability distribution over coordinates and momenta) represents, not a physical situation, but only a certain "state of knowledge" about a range of possible physical situations". And as von Baeyer puts it, "Wavefunctions are not tethered to electrons and carried along like haloes hovering over the heads of saints—they are assigned by an agent and depend on the total information available to the agent." Consequently, there is nothing wrong in principle with Wigner and his friend assigning different wavefunctions to the same system. A similar position is taken by Brukner, who uses an elaboration of the Wigner's-friend scenario to argue for it.


title: Wigner's friend

text: In 2016, Frauchiger and Renner used an elaboration of the Wigner's-friend scenario to argue that quantum theory cannot be used to model physical systems that are themselves agents who use quantum theory. They provide an information-theoretic analysis of two specifically connected pairs of "Wigner's friend" experiments, where the human observers are modelled within quantum theory. By then letting the four different agents reason about each other's measurement results (using the laws of quantum mechanics), contradictory statements are derived.


title: Wigner's friend

text: The resulting theorem highlights an incompatibility of a number of assumptions that are usually taken for granted when modelling measurements in quantum mechanics.


title: Wigner's friend

text: In the title of their published version of September 2018, the authors' interpretation of their result is apparent: Quantum theory as given by the textbook and used in the numerous laboratory experiments to date "cannot consistently describe the use of itself" in any given (hypothetical) scenario. The implications of the result are currently subject to many debates among physicists of both theoretical and experimental quantum mechanics. In particular, the various proponents of the different interpretations of quantum mechanics have challenged the validity of the Frauchiger–Renner argument.


title: Wigner's friend

text: The experiment was designed using a combination of arguments by Wigner (Wigner's friend), Deutsch and Hardy (see Hardy's paradox). The setup involves a number of macroscopic agents (observers) performing predefined quantum measurements in a given time order. Those agents are assumed to all be aware of the whole experiment and to be able to use quantum theory to make statements about other people's measurement results. The design of the thought experiment is such that the different agents' observations along with their logical conclusions drawn from a quantum-theoretical analysis yields inconsistent statements.


title: Wigner's friend

text: The scenario corresponds roughly to two parallel pairs of "Wigners" and friends: formula_33 with formula_34 and formula_35 with formula_36. The friends each measure a specific spin system, and each Wigner measures "his" friend's laboratory (which includes the friend). The individual agents make logical conclusions that are based on their measurement result, aiming at predictions about other agent's measurements within the protocol. Frauchiger and Renner argue that an inconsistency occurs if three assumptions are taken to be simultaneously valid. Roughly speaking, those assumptions are


title: Wigner's friend

text: More precisely, assumption (Q) involves the probability predictions within quantum theory given by the Born rule. This means that an agent is allowed to trust this rule being correct in assigning probabilities to other outcomes conditioned on his own measurement result. It is, however, sufficient for the extended Wigner's friend experiment to assume the validity of the Born rule for probability-1 cases, i.e., if the prediction can be made with certainty.


title: Wigner's friend

text: Assumption (S) specifies that once an agent has arrived at a probability-1 assignment of a certain outcome for a given measurement, they could never agree to a different outcome for the same measurement.


title: Wigner's friend

text: Assumption (C) invokes a consistency among different agents' statements in the following manner: The statement ""I know (by the theory) that they know (by the same theory) that x"" is equivalent to ""I know that x"".


title: Wigner's friend

text: Assumptions (Q) and (S) are used by the agents when reasoning about measurement outcomes of other agents, and assumption (C) comes in when an agent combines other agent's statements with their own. The result is contradictory, and therefore, assumptions (Q), (C) and (S) cannot all be valid, hence the no-go theorem.


title: Wigner's friend

text: The meaning and implications of the Frauchiger–Renner thought experiment are highly debated. A number of assumptions taken in the argument are very foundational in content and therefore cannot be given up easily. However, the questions remains whether there are "hidden" assumptions that do not explicitly appear in the argument. The authors themselves conclude that "quantum theory cannot be extrapolated to complex systems, at least not in a straightforward manner". On the other hand, one presentation of the experiment as a quantum circuit models the agents as single qubits and their reasoning as simple conditional operations.


title: Wigner's friend

text: QBism and relational quantum mechanics have been argued to avoid the contradiction suggested by the extended Wigner's-friend scenario of Frauchiger and Renner.


title: Wigner's friend

text: Stephen Baxter's novel "Timelike Infinity" (1992) discusses a variation of Wigner's friend thought experiment through a refugee group of humans self-named "The Friends of Wigner". They believe that an ultimate observer at the end of time may collapse all possible entangled wave-functions generated since the beginning of the universe, hence choosing a reality without oppression.


title: Michael Wilbon

text: Michael Wilbon (; born ) is an American commentator for ESPN and former sportswriter and columnist for "The Washington Post". He is an analyst for ESPN and has co-hosted "Pardon the Interruption" on ESPN since 2001.


title: Michael Wilbon

text: Wilbon was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. He graduated from St. Ignatius College Preparatory School in 1976 and received his journalism degree in 1980 from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. While in college, Wilbon wrote for "The Daily Northwestern".


title: Michael Wilbon

text: Wilbon began working for "The Washington Post" in 1980 after summer internships at the newspaper in 1979 and 1980. He covered college sports, Major League Baseball, the National Football League and the National Basketball Association before being promoted to full-time columnist in 1990. His column in the "Post", which dealt as much with the culture of sports as the action on the court or field, appeared up to four times a week until he left to work full-time for ESPN on December 7, 2010.


title: Michael Wilbon

text: In his career, Wilbon covered ten Summer and Winter Olympic Games for "The Washington Post", every Super Bowl since 1987, nearly every Final Four since 1982 and each year's NBA Finals since . Notably, he was also the only reporter based outside of Hawaii to cover the historic basketball upset of top-ranked Virginia by then-NAIA member Chaminade in 1982 (he was in Honolulu to cover a college football bowl game).


title: Michael Wilbon

text: During his time at the "Post", Wilbon earned the reputation as one of "the best deadline writer[s] in American newspapers." In 2001, Wilbon was named the top sports columnist by the Society of Professional Journalists.


title: Michael Wilbon

text: In recent years, Wilbon has become more known as an ESPN personality than as a reporter. On December 7, 2010, he wrote his last column for the "Washington Post" and officially dedicated full-time to work for ESPN and ABC.


title: Michael Wilbon

text: After contributing to ESPN's "The Sports Reporters" and other shows on the cable network, Wilbon began co-hosting ESPN's daily opinion forum "Pardon the Interruption" ("PTI") with Tony Kornheiser on October 22, 2001. Wilbon was also a member of ABC's "NBA Countdown" (which he hosted with Jalen Rose, Bill Simmons and Magic Johnson), which was the pre-game show for the network's NBA telecasts.


title: Michael Wilbon

text: In addition to his work at "The Washington Post", "PTI" and ESPN, Wilbon appeared weekly on WRC-TV in Washington, D.C. with WRC Sports Director George Michael, and Pro Football Hall of Famers John Riggins and Sonny Jurgensen on "Redskins Report" during the football season. He also appeared with Michael, "USA Today" basketball writer David Dupree and Tony Kornheiser on "Full Court Press" during the basketball season. Both of these shows were canceled in December 2008 due to budget cuts. Wilbon also forged a close friendship with former Marshall and former NFL quarterback Byron Leftwich while the young passer was a standout player for HD Woodson in Washington, D.C.


title: Michael Wilbon

text: In late 2006, Wilbon agreed to a multi-year contract extension with ESPN. After accepting the contract, Wilbon offered to resign from the "Post", but the newspaper's chairman Don Graham and executive editor Len Downie both asked him to stay on. The network gained priority therein with regards to conflicts with his newspaper assignments. The first major conflict occurred on February 4, 2007, when Wilbon covered a Detroit Pistons–Cleveland Cavaliers game instead of Super Bowl XLI.


title: Michael Wilbon

text: Wilbon currently lives in Bethesda, Maryland, and also has a home in Scottsdale, Arizona. Wilbon and his wife Cheryl Johnson Wilbon had their first child, Matthew Raymond Wilbon, via surrogate on March 26, 2008. Kornheiser often refers to Matthew affectionately as "Lilbon."


title: Michael Wilbon

text: Wilbon has a cousin, Travon Bellamy, who played for the University of Illinois football team. Former ABC News reporter Carole Simpson is Wilbon's cousin.


title: Michael Wilbon

text: Wilbon suffered a heart attack on January 27, 2008. After complaining of chest pains, he was taken to a Scottsdale hospital where doctors performed an angioplasty. Wilbon is also a type-2 diabetic.


title: Michael Wilbon

text: On August 10, 2008, during a Cubs–Cardinals game at Wrigley Field, Wilbon threw out the ceremonial first pitch and then sang "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" as part of the seventh-inning stretch. Footage of Wilbon wearing a tucked-in Cubs jersey and bouncing the pitch is frequently shown on "Pardon The Interruption" as a friendly teasing by Kornheiser.


title: Michael Wilbon

text: In May 2009, Wilbon competed in a made-for-TV "King of Bowling" show against pro bowling star Wes Malott. Wilbon beat Malott by a score of 256–248, but Wilbon received a 57-pin handicap and Malott had to use a plastic ball.


title: Michael Wilbon

text: On July 12, 2013, Wilbon, Kornheiser and Tony Reali (PTI statistician and de facto co-host) were guests at the White House. After lunch the trio met in the Oval Office with President Barack Obama.


title: Social intelligence

text: Social intelligence is the capacity to know oneself and to know others. Social intelligence is learned and develops from experience with people and learning from success and failures in social settings. Social intelligence is the ability to understand your own and others actions. It is also known as "tact" or "common sense", or "street smarts". It is an important interpersonal skill that will help individuals succeed in all aspects of their lives.


title: Social intelligence

text: Social scientist Ross Honeywill postulates that social intelligence is an aggregated measure of self- and social-awareness, evolved social beliefs and attitudes, and a capacity and appetite to manage complex social change. Neuropsychologist Nicholas Humphrey believes that it is social intelligence that defines who we are as humans.


title: Social intelligence

text: The original definition (by Edward Thorndike in 1920) is "the ability to understand and manage men and women and boys and girls, to act wisely in human relations". It is thus equivalent to interpersonal intelligence, one of the types of intelligence identified in Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, and closely related to theory of mind.


title: Social intelligence

text: An updated definition coined by Nancy Cantor and John F. Kihlstrom in 1987 is “the individual's fund of knowledge about the social world." More recently in 2006 Professor Eleni Andreou described social intelligence as being similar to "social skills and competence"


title: Social intelligence

text: Social intelligence and interpersonal intelligence were previously believed to be closely related, however, the two subjects diverged into two unique fields of study.


title: Social intelligence

text: Other authors have restricted the definition to deal only with knowledge of social situations, perhaps more properly called social cognition or social marketing intelligence, as it pertains to trending socio-psychological advertising and marketing strategies and tactics. According to Sean Foleno, social intelligence is a person's competence to optimally understand one's environment and react appropriately for socially successful conduct.


title: Social intelligence

text: The multiple definitions listed indicate there is yet to be a consensus on the operational definition of social intelligence.


title: Social intelligence

text: The social intelligence hypothesis states that social intelligence, that is, complex socialization such as politics, romance, family relationships, quarrels, collaboration, reciprocity, and altruism,


title: Social intelligence

text: This hypothesis claims that the demands of living together is what drives our need for intelligence, and that social intelligence is an evolutionary adaptation for dealing with highly complex social situations, as well as gaining and maintaining power in social groups.


title: Social intelligence

text: Archaeologist Steve Mithen believes that there are two key evolutionary periods of human brain growth that contextualize the social intelligence hypothesis. The first was about two million years ago, when the brain more than doubled in size. Mithen believes that this growth was because people were living in larger, more complex groups, and had to keep track of more people and relationships. These changes required a greater mental capacity and, in turn, a larger brain size.


title: Social intelligence

text: The second key growth period in human brain size occurred between 600,000 and 200,000 years ago, when the brain reached its modern size. While this growth is still not fully explained, Mithen believes that it is related to the evolution of language. Language may be the most complex cognitive task we undertake. Language is directly related to social intelligence because it is primarily used to mediate social relationships.


title: Social intelligence

text: Social intelligence was a critical factor in brain growth. Social and cognitive complexity co-evolve.


title: Social intelligence

text: The social intelligence quotient (SQ) is a statistical abstraction, similar to the ‘standard score’ approach used in IQ tests, with a mean of 100. Scores of 140 or above are considered to be very high. Unlike the standard IQ test, it is not a fixed model. It leans more toward Jean Piaget's theory that intelligence is not a fixed attribute, but a complex hierarchy of information-processing skills underlying an adaptive equilibrium between the individual and the environment. Therefore, an individual can change their SQ by altering their attitudes and behavior in response to their social environment.


title: Social intelligence

text: SQ has until recently been measured by techniques such as question and answer sessions. These sessions assess the person's pragmatic abilities to test eligibility in certain special education courses; however, some tests have been developed to measure social intelligence. This test can be used when diagnosing autism spectrum disorders. This test can also be used to check for some non-autistic or semi-autistic conditions such as semantic pragmatic disorder or SPD, schizophrenia, dyssemia and ADHD.


title: Social intelligence

text: Some social intelligence measures exist which are self-report. Although easy to administer, there is some question as to whether self-report social intelligence measures would better be interpreted in terms of social self-efficacy (that is, one's confidence in one's ability to deal with social information).


title: Social intelligence

text: Since low SQ individuals may not have skills necessary to communicate with customers and/or co-workers, they are most successful with minimal customer interaction, smaller groups, or independent work. People with SQs over 120 are considered socially skilled, and may work exceptionally well with jobs that involve direct contact and communication with other people.


title: Social intelligence

text: George Washington University Social Intelligence Test: Is one of the only ability measures available for assessing social intelligence and was created in June 1928 by Dr.Thelma Hunt a psychologist from George Washington University. It was originally proposed as a measurement of a person's capacity to deal with people and social relationships. The test is designed to assess various social abilities which consisted of observing human behavior, social situation judgement, name & face memory and theory of mind from facial expressions. The George Washington University Social Intelligence Test revised second edition consists of items as quoted:


title: Social intelligence

text: Nicholas Humphrey points to a difference between intelligence being measured by IQ tests and social intelligence. Some autistic children are extremely intelligent because they have well developed skills of observing and memorizing information, however they have low social intelligence. For a long time, the field was dominated by behaviorism, that is, the theory that one could understand animals including humans, just by observing their behavior and finding correlations. But recent theories indicate that one must consider the inner structure behavior.


title: Social intelligence

text: Social intelligence has declined in the digital age. Previously individuals would engage in conversations with people next to them in line or on the train but now they are often looking at their smartphones. Since social intelligence is learned and takes practice, experts are worried that the increase in digital communication will harm social intelligence skills.


title: Social intelligence

text: Research psychologists studying social cognition and social neuroscience have discovered many principles in which human social intelligence operates. In early work on this topic, psychologists Nancy Cantor and John Kihlstrom outlined the kinds of concepts people use to make sense of their social relations (e.g., "What situation am I in?, What kind of person is this?, Who is talking to me?"), the rules they use to draw inferences ("What did he mean by that?") and plan actions ("What am I going to do about it?").


title: Social intelligence

text: More recently, popular science writer Daniel Goleman has drawn on social neuroscience research to propose that social intelligence is made up of social awareness (including empathy, attunement, empathic accuracy, and social cognition) and social facility (including synchrony, self-presentation, influence, and concern). Goleman's research indicates that our social relationships have a direct effect on our physical health, and the deeper the relationship the deeper the impact. Effects include blood flow, breathing, mood such as fatigue and depression, and weakening of the immune system.


title: Social intelligence

text: It is believed that intelligence is amplified by increased social interactions as declared by researcher Raymond H. Hartjen. This suggests that children require continuous opportunities for interpersonal experiences in order to develop a keen 'inter-personal psychology'. Traditional classrooms do not permit the interaction of complex social behavior. Instead, students in traditional settings are treated as learners who must be infused with more and more complex forms of information. The structure of schools today allows very few of these skills, critical for survival in the world, to develop. Because we so limit the development of the skills of "natural psychologist" in traditional schools, graduates enter the job market handicapped to the point of being incapable of surviving on their own. In contrast, students who have had an opportunity to develop their skills in multi-age classrooms and at democratic settings rise above their less socially skilled peers. They have a good sense of self, know what they want in life and have the skills to begin their quest.


title: Social intelligence

text: The issue here is psychology versus social intelligence—as a separate and distinct perspective, seldom articulated. An appropriate introduction contains certain hypothetical assumptions about social structure and function, as it relates to intelligence defined and expressed by groups, constrained by cultural expectations that assert potential realities, but make no claims that there is an "exterior" social truth to be defined. This perspective pursues the view that social structures can be defined with the warning that what is mapped into the structure and how that information is stored, retrieved, and decided upon are variable, but can be contained in an abstract and formal grammar—a sort of game of definitions and rules that permit and project an evolving intelligence. Two halves of the coin: one half psychology; the other half social. Unfortunately, most references to social intelligence relate to an individual's social skills. Not mentioned, and more important, is how social intelligence (speaking of a group or assembly of groups) processes information about the world and shares it with participants in the group(s). Are there social structures or can they be designed to accumulate and reveal information to the individual or to other groups. The bigger question is how groups and societies map the environment (ecological, social and personal) into a social structure. How is that structure able to contain a worldview and to reveal that view to the participants? How are decisions made?


title: Social intelligence

text: J. P. Guilford was the first researcher to approach the problem of social intelligence from the measurement viewpoint. He had developed a test of social intelligence, and suggested that the social intelligence is a unit, that does not depend on common intellectual factor, but related with the comprehension of behavioral information.


title: Almond Blossoms

text: Almond Blossoms is a group of several paintings made in 1888 and 1890 by Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Saint-Rémy, southern France of blossoming almond trees. Flowering trees were special to van Gogh. They represented awakening and hope. He enjoyed them aesthetically and found joy in painting flowering trees. The works reflect the influence of Impressionism, Divisionism, and Japanese woodcuts. "Almond Blossom" was made to celebrate the birth of his nephew and namesake, son of his brother Theo and sister-in-law Jo.


title: Almond Blossoms

text: In 1888 van Gogh became inspired in southern France and began the most productive period of his painting career. In connection with his painting "Farmhouse in Provence" (1888), the National Gallery of Art notes that:


title: Almond Blossoms

text: It was sun that van Gogh sought in Provence, a brilliance and light that would wash out detail and simplify forms,


title: Almond Blossoms

text: reducing the world around him to the sort of pattern he admired in Japanese woodblocks. Arles, he said, was "the Japan of the South." Here, he felt, the flattening effect of the sun would strengthen the outlines of compositions and reduce nuances of color to a few vivid contrasts. Pairs of complements—the red and green of the plants, the woven highlights of oranges and blue in the fence, even the pink clouds that enliven the turquoise sky — almost vibrate against each other.


title: Almond Blossoms

text: When van Gogh arrived in Arles in March 1888 fruit trees in the orchards were about to bloom. The blossoms of the apricot, peach and plum trees motivated him, and within a month he had created fourteen paintings of blossoming fruit trees. Excited by the subject matter, van Gogh completed nearly one painting a day. Around April 21 he wrote to Theo, that he "will have to seek something new, now the orchards have almost finished blossoming."


title: Almond Blossoms

text: Van Gogh's work reflected his interest in Japanese wood block prints. Hiroshige's "Plum Park in Kameido" demonstrates portrayal of beautiful subject matter with flat patterns of colors and no shadow. Van Gogh used the term "Japonaiserie" to express this influence; he collected hundreds of Japanese prints and likened the works of the great Japanese artists, like Hiroshige, to those of Rembrandt, Hals, and Vermeer. Hiroshige was one of the last great masters of the Japanese genre called "ukiyo-e". Van Gogh integrated some of the technical aspects of ukiyo-e into his work as his two 1887 homages to Hiroshige demonstrates.


title: Almond Blossoms

text: The Japanese paintings represent Van Gogh's search for serenity, which he describes in a letter to his sister, "Having as much of this serenity as possible, even though one knows little – nothing – for certain, is perhaps a better remedy for all diseases than all the things that are sold at the chemist's shop." The southern region and the flowering trees seem to awaken van Gogh from his doldrums into a state of clear direction, hyper-activity and good cheer. He wrote, "I am up to my ears in work for the trees are in blossom and I want to paint a Provençal orchard of astonishing gaiety." While in the past a very active period would have drained him, this time he was invigorated.


title: Almond Blossoms

text: Vincent wrote to Theo, "Down here it is freezing hard and there is still snow in the countryside," and he has "two small studies of an almond-tree branch already in flower in spite of it." The two studies are "Blossoming Almond Branch in a Glass" and "Blossoming Almond Branch in a Glass with a Book."


title: Almond Blossoms

text: Although fruit trees were about to bloom when Vincent arrived in Arles, the town had just received a layer of snow, driving van Gogh inside for his first week in Arles where he worked on still life, such as a branch from an almond tree. To reflect the early signs of spring, he used delicate brushstrokes and pastel shades for "Blossoming Almond Branch in a Glass".


title: Almond Blossoms

text: In "Art Inspiring Transmutations of Life", Bruce Ross evaluates the Impressionists' effect on van Gogh's work,


title: Almond Blossoms

text: Van Gogh's bright "Sprig of Flowering Almond in a Glass" embodies these streams* while exploring Japanese aesthetic values. A broken-off sprig is set in a simple glass. The sprig is highlighted by a red line along the beige wall and lavish empty space. There is no formal decorative intent. Van Gogh's name, also in bright red, hovers above a sprig in the upper left as if a symbol of hope. Van Gogh has transformed the still life with the help of these values. He has imbued a form predicated on death to one focused on life and possibility. His use of bright color reflects this. There is an individual, and hence essential, character to his subject, a sprig of almond buds and opening blossoms. This still life resembles the Japanese art of flower arrangement, ikebana, in its simplicity and evoked hopefulness as well as in its formal use of empty space.


title: Almond Blossoms

text: In mid-March 1888 van Gogh writes of the weather and that the almond trees are coming into full flower, "The weather here is changeable, often windy with turbulent skies, but the almond trees are beginning to flower everywhere."


title: Almond Blossoms

text: In his flowering trees, Vincent attained a sense of spontaneity, freeing himself from the strict self-analytical approach he took in Paris. In "Almond Tree in Blossom", Vincent used the light, broken strokes of impressionism and the dabs of colour of divisionism for a sparkling surface effect. The distinctive contours of the tree and its position in the foreground recall the formal qualities of Japanese prints.


title: Almond Blossoms

text: The rendering of "Almond Blossom" is positioned close and accessible to the viewer and the branches appear to reach out beyond the painting's frame.


title: Almond Blossoms

text: Theo wrote to his brother Vincent on January 31, 1890, to announce the birth of his son, Vincent Willem van Gogh. As a means of celebration, Vincent began work on a painting for Theo and his wife. He was very close to his brother and he sought to symbolize new life in the flowers of the almond tree for the birth of baby Vincent.


title: Almond Blossoms

text: How glad I was when the news came... I should have greatly preferred him to call the boy after Father, of whom I have been thinking so much these days, instead of after me; but seeing it has now been done, I started right away to make a picture for him, to hang in their bedroom, big branches of white almond blossom against a blue sky.


title: Almond Blossoms

text: The composition is unlike any other of van Gogh's paintings. The branches of the almond tree seem to float against the blue sky and fill the picture plane. The close-up of the branches brings to mind Delacroix's proposition that "even a part of a thing is kind of a complete entity in itself." Dark lines outline the branches. This is a feature that Van Gogh had admired in Japanese floral studies that, for example, may depict a portion of a stalk of bamboo in an empty space. The bright color is reflective of the paintings made in Arles and the transformational work van Gogh had on the still life genre.


title: Almond Blossoms

text: Van Gogh biographer Steven Naifeh speculates that in painting "Almond Blossoms", Van Gogh drew inspiration from his friend John Russell's 1887 painting "Almond Trees in Blossom". Russell in turn may have derived his work from Japanese artist Hokusai's 1833 woodblock "Bullfinch and Weeping Cherry".


title: Alba Iulia

text: Alba Iulia (; or "Carlsburg", formerly "Weißenburg"; ; ) is a city that serves as the seat of Alba County in the west-central part of Romania. Located on the Mureș River in the historical region of Transylvania, it has a population of 63,536 ().


title: Alba Iulia

text: During ancient times, the site was the location of the Roman camp Apulum. Since the High Middle Ages, the city has been the seat of Transylvania's Roman Catholic diocese. Between 1542 and 1690 it was the capital of the principality of Transylvania. At one point it also was a center of the Eastern Orthodox Metropolitan of Transylvania with suffragan to Vad diocese. On 1 December 1918, the Union of Transylvania with Romania was declared in Alba Iulia, and the Romania's King Ferdinand I and Queen Marie were crowned in the Alba Iulia Orthodox Cathedral, in 1922.


title: Alba Iulia

text: Alba Iulia is historically important for Romanians, Hungarians, and Transylvanian Saxons. In December 2018, Alba Iulia was officially declared "Capital of the Great Union of Romania".


title: Alba Iulia

text: The city administers four villages: Bărăbanț ("Borbánd"), Micești ("Ompolykisfalud"), Oarda ("Alsóváradja"), and Pâclișa ("Poklos").


title: Alba Iulia

text: During the Roman period the settlement was called Apulum (from the Dacian "Apoulon", mentioned by Ptolemy). When the settlement upon Roman ruins became the seat of a dukedom in the 10th century, the population may have been Slavic. From the 9th to the 11th century the settlement bore the Slavic name "Bălgrad" (meaning "white castle" or "white town"). The old Romanian name of the town was "Bălgrad", originated from Slavic.


title: Alba Iulia

text: The Hungarian name "Gyulafehérvár" is a translation of the earlier Slavic form, meaning "white castle of the Gyula" or "white city of Julius". The current name, "Alba Iulia", is a Romanian language translation of this. "Alba", the Romanian feminine form of the word for "White", and "Iulia" ("Julius") referring to Gyula, a mid-tenth-century Hungarian warlord who was baptized in Constantinople.


title: Alba Iulia

text: The city's Latin name in the 10th century was "Civitatem Albam in Ereel". The first part of the name "Alba" denotes the ruins of the Roman fort "Apulum" (the pre-feudal white citadel). Later in the Middle Ages, different names occurred as "Frank episcopus Belleggradienesis" in 1071, "Albae Civitatis" in 1134, "Belegrada" in 1153, "Albensis Ultrasilvanus" in 1177, "eccl. Micahelis" in 1199, "Albe Transilvane" in 1200, "Albe Transsilvane" in 1201, "castrum Albens" in 1206, "canonicis Albensibus" in 1213, "Albensis eccl. Transsylvane" in 1219, "B. Michaelis arch. Transsilv." in 1231, "Alba... Civitas" in 1242, "Alba sedes eptus" in 1245, "Alba Jula" in 1291, "Feyrvar" in 1572, "Feyérvár" in 1574, "Weissenburg" in 1576, Belugrad in 1579, "Gyula Feyervár" in 1619, "Gyula Fehérvár" in 1690, and "Karlsburg" in 1715.


title: Alba Iulia

text: Under the influence of the Hungarian Gyulafehérvár, the town's Latin name eventually became "Alba Julia" or "Alba Yulia". Its modern name "Alba Iulia" is an adoption of the town's medieval Latin name. It started to spread in Romanian common speech in the 18th century. The modern name has been officially used since the town became part of Romania.


title: Alba Iulia

text: The sixteenth-century German name was "Weyssenburg". The Saxons later renamed the town to "Karlsburg" (Carlsburg) in honor of Charles VI (1685–1740). In Yiddish and Hebrew "Karlsburg" was prevalent; in Ladino sources "Carlosburg". "Alba Carolina" was also a medieval Latin form of its name.


title: Alba Iulia

text: The modern city is located near the site of the important Dacian political, economic and social centre of "Apulon", which was mentioned by the ancient Greek geographer Ptolemy and believed by some archaeologists to be the Dacian fortifications on top of Piatra Craivii. After Dacia became a province of the Roman Empire, the capital of Dacia Apulensis was established here, and the city was known as "Apulum". Apulum was the largest city in Roman Dacia and was the seat of the XIII Gemina Legion. Apulum is the largest castrum located in Romania, occupying (750 x 500 m).


title: Alba Iulia

text: The "Gesta Hungarorum" mentions a Hungarian regent named Jula or Geulathe maternal grandfather of Stephen I of Hungary and lord [regent] of Transylvaniawho built the capital of his dukedom there during the 10th century. Geula was baptized in the Byzantine Empire and built around 950 in Alba Iulia the first church of Transylvania. The ruins of a church were discovered in 2011. According to Ioan Aurel Pop and other historians, here lived Hierotheos the first bishop of Transylvania, who accompanied Geula back to Hungary after Geula had been baptized in Constantinople around 950.


title: Alba Iulia

text: After Stephen I adopted Catholicism, and the establishment of the Catholic Transylvanian bishopric, recent archaeological discoveries suggest that the first cathedral was built in the 11th century or possibly before. The present Catholic cathedral was built in the 12th or 13th century. In 1442, John Hunyadi, Voivode of Transylvania, used the citadel to prepare for a major battle against the Ottoman Turks. The cathedral was enlarged during his reign and he was entombed there after his death.


title: Alba Iulia

text: In 1542 — after the partition of the Kingdom of Hungary — Alba Iulia became the capital of Transylvania and some of its neighboring territories to the west (later known as Partium), the autonomous Principality of Transylvania, and remained so until 1690. The Treaty of Weissenburg was signed in the town in 1551. During the reign of Prince Gábor Bethlen, the city reached a high point in its cultural history with the establishment of an academy. The former Ottoman Turkish equivalent was "Erdel Belgradı" or "Belgrad-ı Erdel" ("Belgrade of Transylvania" in English) where Erdel (Erdély) was added to prevent confusion with Belgrat and Arnavut Belgradı ("Albanian Belgrade" in Turkish, early name of Berat during Ottoman rule).


title: Alba Iulia

text: In 29 November 1599, Michael the Brave, Voivode of Wallachia, entered Alba Iulia following his victory in the Battle of Șelimbăr and became Voivode of Transylvania. In 1600 he gained control of Moldavia, uniting the principalities of Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania under his rule, which lasted for a year and a half until he was murdered in 1601, by General Giorgio Basta's agents.


title: Alba Iulia

text: Alba Iulia became part of the Habsburg Monarchy in 1690. The fortress "Alba Carolina", designed by architect Giovanni Morando Visconti, was built between 1716 and 1735, at the behest of Emperor Charles VI of Habsburg. The leaders of the Transylvanian peasant rebellion were executed in Alba Iulia in January 1785. Important milestones in the city's development include the creation of the Batthyaneum Library in 1780 and the arrival of the railway in the 19th century.


title: Alba Iulia

text: At the end of World War I, representatives of the Romanian population of Transylvania, the National Assembly of Romanians of Transylvania and Hungary, gathered in Alba Iulia on 1 December 1918 during the so-called Great National Assembly of Alba Iulia to proclaim the Union of Transylvania with the Kingdom of Romania. The representatives of the Transylvanian Saxons decided to join this declaration on 8 January 1919.


title: Alba Iulia

text: In 1922, Ferdinand I of Romania was symbolically crowned King of Romania in Alba Iulia. In October 2012, at the 90th anniversary of King Ferdinand's coronation, his great-granddaughter Princess Margarita of Romania visited Alba Iulia to commemorate the event.


title: Alba Iulia

text: The Jewish community, which was the first in Transylvania, was established in the mid-16th century. In the 17th century, a Sephardic community was founded. The 18th century saw an influx of Ashkenazim from Hungary and Wallachia, as well as Sephardim. From 1754 to 1868, the town rabbi was the chief rabbi of Transylvania. A synagogue was built in 1840, with a Sephardic one following in 1874. Most local Jews in the 19th century worked in viticulture and bought land for growing vines; in the 20th century, they were mainly artisans. By 1930, the 1558 Jews of Alba Iulia represented nearly 13% of the town's population.


title: Alba Iulia

text: In October 1940, during the National Legionary State, the Iron Guard terrorized local Jews. The following year, the Ion Antonescu regime confiscated Jewish property and sent the men to forced labor. After World War II, the community was re-established but soon dwindled as Jews emigrated.


title: Alba Iulia

text: The main historical area of Alba Iulia is the Upper Town region, developed by Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor in honour of whom the Habsburgs renamed the city Karlsburg. The fortress, with seven bastions in a stellar shape, was constructed between 1716 and 1735 by two Swiss fortification architects. The first was Giovanni Morandi Visconti, who built two old Italian-style bastions. The second was Nicolaus Doxat de Demoretnicknamed "Austrian Vauban". After 1720, the two architects radically transformed the medieval fortress shaped by the former Roman castrum into a seven-bastion baroque fortress, developing Menno van Coehorn's new Dutch system, of which the fortress of Alba Iulia is the best preserved example.


title: Alba Iulia

text: Inside the fortress are The Union Hall with the National Honour Gallery, The National History Museum of Unification, the Princely Palace (Voivodal Palace), the Orthodox cathedral, the Roman Catholic cathedral, the Batthyaneum Library, the Roman Catholic bishop's palace, the Apor Palace, and the University of Alba Iulia. Built in the 10th and 11th centuries, the Roman Catholic cathedral is the most representative building in the medieval Romanic style in Transylvania, and is considered to be an important monument of early Transylvanian medieval architecture. The tombs of John Hunyadi and Isabella JagiełłoQueen of Hungary are located there.


title: Alba Iulia

text: The Batthyaneum Library is held in a former church built in Baroque style. In 1780, Ignác Batthyány, bishop of Transylvania, adapted the inside of the building for use as a library. It is famous for its series of manuscripts, incunabula and rare bookssuch as half of the 9th century Codex Aureus of Lorsch, the 15th century Codex Burgundus and the 13th century Biblia Sacra (13th century). The first astronomical observatory in Transylvania was founded here in 1792. The Apor Palace, situated on the same street as the Bathyaneum Library, belonged to Prince Apor and was built in the second half of the 17th century. At the beginning of the 18th century it was the residence of the Austrian army leader Prince Steinville. The palace was renovated in 2007 under the supervision of the Romanian Ministry of Culture.


title: Alba Iulia

text: The Orthodox Unification Cathedral was built between 1921 and 1923, following the plans of architect D.G. Ștefănescu and built under the supervision of eng. T. Eremia. The frescoes were painted by Constantin in a traditional iconographic style. The first monarchs of the Unified Romania, King Ferdinand I and Queen Marie were crowned in the cathedral on 15 October 1922.


title: Alba Iulia

text: The National Museum of Unification in Alba Iulia is located in the "Babylon" Building. It was built between 1851 and 1853 for military purposes and became a museum in 1887. The museum exhibits over 130,000 pieces of artworks, organized chronologically. The Unification Hall, also part of the National History Museum, retains historical significance from having hosted, on 1 December 1918, the rally of the 1228 Romanian delegations from Transylvania who determined the province's union with the Kingdom of Romania. The building was used in 1895 as a military casino.


title: Alba Iulia

text: The Princely Palace (Palatul Principilor or Palatul Voievodal) was Michael the Brave's residence during the first political unification of the Romanians in 1600. Foreign chronicles pictured it as an extremely luxurious building, richly adorned with frescos and marble stairs, which later deteriorated. During the rule of Princes Gábor Bethlen and George II Rákóczi the second palace was restored, but not to its previous condition. After 1716, the building was used as an Habsburg Imperial Army barracks.


title: Alba Iulia

text: According to the 2011 census, there was a total population of 63,536 people living in this town. Of these, 95.3% were ethnic Romanians, 3.2% Romani, 1.9% Hungarians, and 0.2% Germans (more specifically Transylvanian Saxons).


title: Alba Iulia

text: In 1850, Alba Iulia had 5,408 inhabitants, 2,530 of them being Romanians (46.78%), 1,009 Hungarians (18.67%), 748 Germans/Transylvanian Saxons (13.83%), and 1,121 (20.73%) others.


title: Alba Iulia

text: In 1891, the city had 8,167 residents, of which 3,482 were Hungarians (42.63%), 3,426 Romanians (41.94%), and 867 Germans/Transylvanian Saxons (10.62%). By 1910 the number of inhabitants increased to 11,616. 5,226 of them were Hungarians (45%), 5,170 Romanians (44.51%), and 792 Germans/Transylvanian Saxons (6.82%). At the 1930 census, 34.7% of the population were Romanian Orthodox, 28.1% Romanian Greek Catholic, 12.9% Roman Catholic, 12.7% Jews, 7.3% Reformed Protestant, 3.1% Lutheran.


title: Dobaara: See Your Evil

text: Dobaara: See Your Evil () is a 2017 Indian supernatural horror film written and directed by Prawaal Raman. It is an official adaptation of the 2013 American horror film "Oculus"; the original film's director and co-writer, Mike Flanagan, serves as executive producer and received story credits. The film is a B4U Motion Pictures presentation in association with Relativity Media and Zahhak Films Limited. "Dobaara: See Your Evil" is produced by Ishan Saksena, Prawaal Raman, Sunil Shah and Vikram Khakhar and stars Huma Qureshi and Saqib Saleem, with Adil Hussain, Lisa Ray, Abhishek Singh, and Rhea Chakraborty in crucial supporting roles. It was released worldwide on 2 June 2017.


title: Dobaara: See Your Evil

text: It's a story about a mirror believed to be haunted, and the contradictory views between a brother (Saqib Saleem) and sister (Huma Qureshi) dealing with the killing of their parents (Adil Hussain and Lisa Ray) before eleven years. One day they go to a forest and they forget their home's address. At night, they go to an old home. There lived a man called Khanna (Tota Roy Chowdhury).


title: Dobaara: See Your Evil

text: According to the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 29% of critics have given the film a positive review based on 7 reviews. Rohit Vats of Hindustan Times gave the film a rating of 3 out of 5 saying that, "It's a faithful remake of Oculus and can make your hair stand at times. Hindi filmmakers rarely achieve such finesse in mostly predictable paranormal stories." Meena Iyer of The Times of India gave the film a rating of 2.5 saying that, "This one had the potential to be more, but it seems so stretched that you are almost willing to tear the screen yourself and attempt to silence someone." Rohit Bhatnagar of Deccan Chronicle gave the film a rating of 3 out of 5 saying that, "On the whole, Dobaara is engaging and definitely not avoidable." Prasanna Zore of Rediff gave the film a rating of 2 out of 5 and said that, "Watch Dobaara only if you have the guts to overcome, not fear, but boredom." Saibal Chatterjee of NDTV gave the film a rating of 2 out of 5 saying that, "While Dobaara: See Your Evil isn't half as messy as all those grisly ghosts-and-ghouls flicks that Bollywood foists upon us, it isn't a spine-chiller either." Bollywood Hungama gave the film a rating of 2 out of 5 saying that, "On the whole, the essence of "Dobaara: See Your Evil" being a psychological thriller set in the horror genre doesn't come across and is limited to a few scenes." Anupama Chopra of "Film Companion" gave the film a rating of 2 out of 5 and said that, "Dobaara is too silly to be scary."


title: Dobaara: See Your Evil

text: Dobaara: See Your Evil had a very low box office collection, taking only 10 lakhs on its first day. It ran in theatres for 60 days and had a total collection of just 1.36 crore.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: Popes Pius XI (1922–1939) and Pius XII (1939–1958) led the Catholic Church during the rise and fall of Nazi Germany. Around a third of Germans were Catholic in the 1930s, most of them lived in Southern Germany; Protestants dominated the north. The Catholic Church in Germany opposed the Nazi Party, and in the 1933 elections, the proportion of Catholics who voted for the Nazi Party was lower than the national average. Nevertheless, the Catholic-aligned Centre Party voted for the Enabling Act of 1933, which gave Adolf Hitler additional domestic powers to suppress political opponents as Chancellor of Germany. President Paul Von Hindenburg continued to serve as Commander and Chief and he also continued to be responsible for the negotiation of international treaties until his death on 2 August 1934.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: Hitler and several other key Nazis had been raised as Catholics but they became hostile to the Church in their adulthoods; Article 24 of the National Socialist Program called for conditional toleration of Christian denominations and the 1933 Reichskonkordat treaty with the Vatican guaranteed religious freedom for Catholics, but the Nazis sought to suppress the power of the Catholic Church in Germany. Catholic press, schools, and youth organizations were closed, property was confiscated, and about one-third of its clergy faced reprisals from authorities; Catholic lay leaders were among those murdered during the Night of the Long Knives.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: During the rule of the regime, the Church frequently found itself in a difficult position. The Church hierarchy (in Germany) tried to work with the new government, but Pius XI's 1937 encyclical, "Mit brennender Sorge", accused the government of hostility to the church. Catholics fought on both sides during the Second World War, and Hitler's invasion of predominantly-Catholic Poland ignited the conflict in 1939. In the Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany, as in the annexed regions of Slovenia and Austria, Nazi persecution of the church was intense; many Polish clergy were targeted for extermination. Through his links to the German Resistance, Pope Pius XII warned the Allies about the planned Nazi invasion of the Low Countries in 1940. The Nazis gathered dissident priests that year in a dedicated barracks at Dachau, where 95 percent of its 2,720 inmates were Catholic (mostly Poles, with 411 Germans); over 1,000 priests died there. The expropriation of church properties surged after 1941. Although the Vatican (surrounded by Fascist Italy) was officially neutral during the war, it used diplomacy to aid victims and lobby for peace; Vatican Radio and other Catholic media spoke out against the atrocities. Particular clerics stridently opposed Nazi crimes, as in Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen's 1941 sermons in which he expressed his opposition to the regime and its euthanasia programs. Even so, Hitler biographer Alan Bullock wrote: "Neither the Catholic Church, nor the Evangelical Church ... as institutions, felt it possible to take up an attitude of open opposition to the regime". Mary Fulbrook wrote that when politics encroached on the church, Catholics were prepared to resist; the record was patchy and uneven, though, and (with notable exceptions) "it seems that, for many Germans, adherence to the Christian faith proved compatible with at least passive acquiescence in, if not active support for, the Nazi dictatorship". However, even as the Church hierarchy attempted to tread delicately lest the Church itself be destroyed, actively resisting priests such as Heinrich Maier sometimes acted against the express instructions of his church superiors to found groups that, unlike others, sought actively to influence the course of the war in favor of the Allies.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: According to Robert A. Krieg, "Catholic bishops, priests, and lay leaders had criticized National Socialism since its inception in the early 1920s". Catholic sermons and newspapers vigorously denounced Nazism and accused it of espousing neopaganism, and Catholic priests forbade believers from joining the NSDAP. Ludwig Maria Hugo was the first Catholic bishop to condemn membership in the Nazi party, and in 1931 Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber wrote that [t]he bishops as guardians of the true teachings of faith and morals must issue a warning about National Socialism, so long as and insofar as it maintains cultural-political views that are not reconcilable with Catholic doctrine." Cardinal Faulhaber's outspoken criticism of National Socialism gained widespread attention and support from German Catholic churches, and Cardinal Adolf Bertram called German Catholics to oppose National Socialism in its entirety because it "stands in the most pointed contradiction to the fundamental truths of Christianity". Robert A. Krieg states that the condemnations of Nazism by Bertram and von Faulhaber reflected the views of most German Catholics, but many of them were also disillusioned with the institutions of the Weimar Republic.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: Nazi anti-Semitism embraced pseudoscientific racial principles, but ancient antipathies between Christianity and Judaism also contributed to European antisemitism. Anti-Semitism was present in both German Protestantism and Catholicism, but "anti-Semitic acts and attitudes became relatively more frequent in Protestant areas relative to Catholic areas". Even so, in every country under German occupation, priests played a major role in rescuing Jews. The church rescued thousands of Jews by issuing false documents to them, lobbying Axis officials, and hiding Jews in monasteries, convents, schools, the Vatican and the papal residence at Castel Gandolfo. Although Pius XII's role during this period was later contested, the Reich Security Main Office called him a "mouthpiece" for the Jews and in his first encyclical ("Summi Pontificatus"), he called the invasion of Poland an "hour of darkness". In his 1942 Christmas address, he denounced race murders, and in his 1943 encyclical "Mystici corporis Christi", he denounced the murder of disabled people.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: In the post-war period, false identification documents were given to many German war criminals by Catholic priests such as Alois Hudal, frequently facilitating their escape to South America. Both Protestant and Catholic clergy routinely provided Persilschein or "soap certificates" to former Nazis in order to remove the "Nazi taint"; but at no time was such aid an institutional effort. According to a Catholic historian Michael Hesemann, Vatican itself was outraged by such efforts, and Pope Pius XII demanded removal of involved clergy such as Hudal.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: In the 1930s, one-third of the German population was Catholic; political Catholicism was a major force in the interwar Weimar Republic. Catholic leaders denounced Nazi doctrine before 1933, and Catholic regions generally did not vote Nazi. The Nazi Party first developed in largely-Catholic Munich, however, where many Catholics provided enthusiastic support; this early affinity decreased after 1923. Nazism took a different path after its 1920 reconstitution and, by 1925, had an anti-Catholic identity. In early 1931, the German bishops excommunicated the Nazi leadership and banned Catholics from the party. Although the ban was modified in the spring of 1933 due to a law requiring all civil servants and union members to be party members, the condemnation of core Nazi ideology continued. In early 1933, after Nazi successes in the 1932 elections, lay Catholic monarchist Franz von Papen and acting chancellor and presidential advisor Kurt von Schleicher facilitated Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg. In March, amidst the Nazi terror tactics and negotiation which followed the Reichstag Fire Decree, the Centre Party (led by Ludwig Kaas, requiring a written commitment that the president's veto power be retained), the Bavarian People's Party and the monarchist German National People's Party (DNVP) voted for the Enabling Act. The Centre Party's support was crucial (since the act could not be passed by the Nazi-DNVP coalition alone), and it marked Hitler's transition from democratic to dictatorial power. By June 1933 the only institutions not under Nazi domination were the military and the churches. The July 1933 Reichskonkordat between Germany and the Holy See pledged to respect Catholic autonomy and required clerics to keep out of politics. Hitler welcomed the treaty, routinely violating it in the Nazi struggle with the churches. When von Hindenburg died in August 1934, the Nazis claimed jurisdiction of all levels of government; a referendum confirmed Hitler as Germany's Führer. A program of "Gleichschaltung" controlled all collective and social activity, interfering with Catholic schools, youth groups, workers, and cultural groups.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: According to Peter Stachura, most of the Nazi electorate came from the rural and small-town Protestant middle class, whereas German Catholics overwhelmingly voted for the confessional Catholic Centre Party and Bavarian People's Party instead. Voting preferences in the Weimar Republic were mainly determined by social class and religion, and the Catholics formed a distinguishable and tight-knit subculture within Germany, being alienated from the mainstream Protestant society as a result of the Kulturkampf and the NSDAP's strongly anti-Catholic identity.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: Various Nazi Party officials such as Heinrich Himmler, Alfred Rosenberg and Martin Bormann hoped to de-Christianize Germany, or at least realign its theology with their point of view. The government began to close all Catholic institutions which were not strictly religious; Catholic schools were shut by 1939, and the Catholic press by 1941. Clergy, religious women and men, and lay leaders were targeted; thousands were arrested, often on trumped-up charges of currency smuggling or "immorality". Germany's senior cleric, Adolf Cardinal Bertram, ineffectually protested and left broader Catholic resistance up to the individual. The church hierarchy, which had sought "dètente", was disillusioned by 1937. Pius XI issued his "Mit brennender Sorge" encyclical, condemning racism and accusing the Nazis of violations of its treaty and "fundamental hostility" to the church; Germany renewed its crackdown on and propaganda campaign against Catholics. Despite the violence against Catholic Poland, some German priests offered prayers for the German cause at the outbreak of war. Security chief Reinhard Heydrich intensified restrictions on church activities, and expropriation of monasteries, convents and church properties increased in 1941. Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen's 1941 denunciation of Nazi euthanasia and defence of human rights sparked rare popular dissent. The German bishops denounced Nazi policy towards the church in pastoral letters, calling it "unjust oppression".


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: Eugenio Pacelli, former nuncio to Germany, became Pope Pius XII on the eve of war. His legacy is contested. As Vatican Secretary of State, he advocated "détente" via the Reichskonkordat and hoped to build trust and respect in Hitler's government. Pacelli assisted in drafting "Mit brennender Sorge", and his first encyclical ("Summi Pontificatus") called the invasion of Poland an "hour of darkness". Although Pius XII affirmed Vatican neutrality, he maintained links with the German Resistance. Controversy about his reluctance to speak publicly and explicitly about Nazi crimes, however, has continued. Pius XII used diplomacy to aid war victims, lobbied for peace, shared intelligence with the Allies, and employed Vatican Radio and other media to speak out against atrocities. In "Mystici corporis Christi" (1943), he denounced the murder of disabled people; a denunciation by German bishops of the murder of the "innocent and defenceless", including "people of a foreign race or descent", followed. Although Nazi antisemitism embraced pseudoscientific racial principles, ancient antipathies between Christianity and Judaism contributed to European antisemitism. Under Pius XII, the church rescued many thousands of Jews by issuing false documents, lobbying Axis officials, and hiding Jews in monasteries, convents, schools and elsewhere (including the Vatican and Castel Gandolfo).


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: In Poland, Slovenia and Austria, Nazi persecution of the church was harshest. In Austria in particular, the Catholic resistance against National Socialism was active very early on. The groups wanted on the one hand, like those around the Augustinian monk Roman Karl Scholz, to inform the population about the Nazi crimes and, on the other hand, to take active robust action against the Nazi system The group around Karl Burian planned to blow up the Gestapo headquarters in Vienna and the group around Heinrich Maier successfully redirected the production sites of V-1, V-2 rockets, Tiger tanks, Messerschmitt Bf 109, Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet and other aircraft to the Allies so that they could bomb more accurately and the war was over faster. Maier and his people were in contact with Allen Dulles, the head of the OSS in Switzerland since 1942. The group reported to him also about the mass murder in Auschwitz. These Catholic groups were radically persecuted by the Gestapo, also because they uncompromisingly wanted to remove the Austrian territories from the German Reich.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: In 1940 the SS designated the Dachau concentration camp with its own block of priests as the central internment site for Christian clergymen, who were often severely tortured. In addition, there were always special riots against the priests. For example, on Christmas Eve 1938, the Austrian prelate fainted under the Yule tree set up on the roll call square. On a Maundy Thursday, SS guards scourged the Austrian chaplain Andreas Rieser on the naked torso until the blood splattered, and then wound him with a crown of thorns made of barbed wire. On Good Friday 1940, sixty priests were "crucified" by hanging on a stake for an hour. A total of 706 priests were Austrian resistance fighters in Nazi prison, 128 in concentration camps and 20 to 90 were executed or murdered in concentration camps.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: In Germany, the Catholic response to Nazism varied. Cesare Orsenigo, Berlin's papal nuncio, was timid in protesting Nazi crimes and was sympathetic to Italian Fascism. German priests, including Alfred Delp, were closely watched and often denounced, imprisoned or executed. In 1940, the Nazis began gathering dissident priests in a dedicated barracks at Dachau concentration camp; ninety-five percent of its 2,720 inmates were Catholic (mostly Poles, and 411 Germans), and 1,034 died there. In Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany, the Nazis attempted to eradicate the church; over 1,800 Polish clergy died in concentration camps, including Maximilian Kolbe. The German Resistance included the Kreisau Circle and 20 July ploters Claus von Stauffenberg, Jakob Kaiser and Bernhard Letterhaus. Resistance by Bishops Johannes de Jong and Jules-Géraud Saliège, papal diplomat Angelo Rotta, and the nun Margit Slachta contrasts with the apathy and collaborationism of Slovakia's Jozef Tiso and clergy Croat nationalists. From the Vatican, Hugh O'Flaherty coordinated the rescue of thousands of Allied POWs and civilians (including Jews). Austrian bishop Alois Hudal of the Collegio Teutonico in Rome was a Nazi informant; after the war, he and Krunoslav Draganovic of the Pontifical Croatian College of St. Jerome assisted the ratlines spiriting fugitive Nazis out of Europe.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: Although Catholicism in Germany dates back to the missionary work of Columbanus and Saint Boniface in the 6th–8th centuries, Catholics were a minority by the 20th century. The Reformation, begun by Martin Luther in 1517, divided German Christians between Protestantism and Catholicism. Southern and western Germany remained mostly Catholic, and the north and east became mainly Protestant.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: Otto von Bismarck's 1871–1878 Kulturkampf tried to impose Protestant nationalism on the new German Empire, fusing anti-clericalism and suspicion of Catholics (whose loyalty presumably lay with Austria and France). The Centre Party, formed in 1870 to represent the religious interests of Catholics and Protestants, was transformed by the Kulturkampf into the "political voice of Catholics". The Kulturkampf had largely failed by the late 1870s, and many of its edicts were repealed.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: The church enjoyed some privilege in Bavaria, the Rhineland, Westphalia and portions of the south-west, but Catholics experienced some discrimination in the Protestant north. The church had six archbishops, 19 bishops and 20,000 priests during the 1930s, when Catholics made up about one-third of the population. The 1918–19 revolution and the 1919 Weimar Constitution reformed the relationship between church and state; Germany's churches received government subsidies based on church-census data; dependent on state support, they were vulnerable to government influence.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: The Centre Party (Zentrum) was a social and political force in mainly-Protestant Germany, helping to frame the Weimar Constitution and participating in several Weimar Republic coalition governments. It allied with the Social Democrats and the leftist German Democratic Party, maintaining the centre against extremist parties from the left and right. Although the party had defied Bismarck's Kulturkampf, during the summer of 1932 it was "notoriously a Party whose first concern was to make accommodation with any government in power in order to secure the protection of its particular interests". It remained relatively moderate during the radicalisation of German politics at the onset of the Great Depression, but party deputies voted for the Enabling Act of 1933 which gave Hitler absolute power.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: Catholic leaders attacked Nazi ideology during the 1920s and 1930s, and the main Christian opposition to Nazism in Germany came from the church. German bishops warned Catholics against Nazi racism before Hitler's rise, and some dioceses forbade Nazi Party membership. The Catholic press condemned Nazism. John Cornwell wrote about the early Nazi period:


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: Cardinal Faulhaber was appalled by Nazism's totalitarianism, neopaganism and racism and, as Archbishop of Munich and Freising, contributed to the failure of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. The Cologne Bishops Conference condemned Nazism in early 1931, followed by the bishops of Paderborn and Freiburg. With ongoing hostility toward the Nazis by the Catholic press and the Centre Party, few Catholics voted Nazi before the party's takeover in 1933. As in other German churches, however, some clergy and laypeople supported the Nazi administration.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: Five Centre Party politicians were Chancellor of Weimar Germany, Constantin Fehrenbach, Joseph Wirth, Wilhelm Marx, Heinrich Brüning and Franz von Papen. With Germany facing the Great Depression, Brüning was appointed chancellor by Hindenburg and was foreign minister shortly before Hitler came to power. Although he was appointed to form a more-conservative ministry on 28 March 1930, he did not have a Reichstag majority. On 16 July, unable to pass key points of his agenda, Brüning invoked the constitution's Article 48; he dissolved the Reichstag two days later. New elections were set for September; Communist and Nazi representation greatly increased, hastening Germany's drift toward a right-wing dictatorship. Brüning backed Hindenburg against Hitler in the 1932 presidential election, but lost Hindenburg's support as chancellor and resigned in May of that year. Vatican Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli, Ludwig Kaas and many German Catholics were concerned about Brüning's reliance on the Social Democrats for political survival, and Brüning never forgave Pacelli for what he saw as a betrayal of Catholic political tradition.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: Karl Marx's opposition to religion pitted Communist movements against the church, which denounced Communism with Pope Leo XIII's May 1891 "Rerum novarum" encyclical. The church feared Communist conquest (or revolution) in Europe. German Christians were alarmed by the militant Marxist–Leninist atheism which took hold in Russia after its 1917 revolution, a systematic effort to eradicate Christianity. Seminaries were closed, and religious education was criminalized; in 1922, the Bolsheviks arrested Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: Communists, initially led by the moderate Kurt Eisner, briefly attained power in Bavaria in 1919. The revolt was then seized by the radical Eugen Leviné, who helped to establish the Bavarian Soviet Republic. This brief, violent experiment in Munich galvanized anti-Marxist and anti-Semitic sentiment among Munich's largely-Catholic population, and the Nazi movement emerged. Hitler and the Nazis gained support as a bulwark against Communism. As apostolic nuncio, Eugenio Pacelli (later Pius XII) was in Munich during the January 1919 Spartacist uprising. Communists burst into his residence in search of his car—an experience which contributed to Pacelli's lifelong distrust of Communism. Many Catholics felt threatened by the possibility of a radical socialism driven, they perceived, by a cabal of Jews and atheists. According to Robert Ventresca, "After witnessing the turmoil in Munich, Pacelli reserved his harshest criticism for Kurt Eisner." Pacelli saw Eisner, an atheistic, radical socialist with ties to Russian nihilists, as embodying the revolution in Bavaria: "What is more, Pacelli told his superiors, Eisner was a Galician Jew. A threat to Bavaria's religious, political, and social life". Anton Braun, in a well-publicized December 1918 sermon, called Eisner a "sleazy Jew" and his administration a "pack of unbelieving Jews". Pius XI opposed European communism in his 1937 encyclical, "Divini Redemptoris".


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: Nazism could not accept the existence of an autonomous establishment whose legitimacy did not spring from the government, and it desired the subordination of the church to the state. Although Article 24 of the NSDAP party platform called for conditional toleration of Christian denominations and the Reichskonkordat with the Vatican was signed in 1933 (purportedly guaranteeing religious freedom for Catholics), Hitler considered religion fundamentally incompatible with Nazism. His hostility to the church indicated to his subordinates that continuation of the "Kirchenkampf" would be encouraged.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: Many Nazis suspected that Catholics were disloyal to Germany and they also suspected that Catholics also supported "sinister alien forces". William L. Shirer wrote, "Under the leadership of Rosenberg, Bormann and Himmler—backed by Hitler—the Nazi regime intended to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists." Anti-clericalism was strong among grassroots party activists.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: Hitler retained some regard for the church's organisational power but he was contemptuous of its central teachings, which "would mean the systematic cultivation of human failure". Aware that Bismarck's 1870s "kulturkampf" was defeated by the Centre Party, he believed that Nazism could only succeed if political Catholicism and its democratic networks were eliminated. Conservative elements, such as the officer corps, opposed Nazi persecution of the churches.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: Although Hitler occasionally said that he wanted to delay the church struggle and he was prepared to restrain his anti-clericalism, his inflammatory remarks to the members of his inner circle encouraged them to continue their battle with the churches. He said that science would destroy the last vestiges of superstition, and Nazism and religion could not co-exist in the long run. Germany could not tolerate foreign influences such as the Vatican, and priests were "black bugs" and "abortions in black cassocks".


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels was among the most aggressive anti-church radicals, and prioritized the conflict with the churches. Born to a Catholic family, he became one of the government's most relentless antisemites. On the "Church Question", he wrote "after the war it has to be generally solved. ... There is, namely, an insoluble opposition between the Christian and a heroic-German world view." Goebbels led the persecution of Catholic clergy.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich headed the Nazi security forces, and were key architects of the Final Solution. They considered Christian values the enemies of Nazism and "eternally the same", wrote Heydrich: "the Jew, the Freemason, and the politically-oriented cleric." Heydrich considered Christianity and liberal individualism the residue of inherited racial characteristics, biologically sourced to Jews (who must be exterminated). Himmler was vehemently opposed to Christian sexual morality and the "principle of Christian mercy", which he saw as an obstacle to his battle with "subhumans." In 1937, he wrote:


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: Himmler saw the main task of his Schutzstaffel (SS) organisation as "acting as the vanguard in overcoming Christianity and restoring a 'Germanic' way of living" to prepare for the coming conflict between "humans and subhumans"; although the Nazi movement opposed Jews and Communists, "by linking de-Christianisation with re-Germanization, Himmler had provided the SS with a goal and purpose all of its own" and made it a "cult of the Teutons".


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: Martin Bormann, who became Hitler's private secretary in 1941, was a militant anti-church radical and loathed Christianity's Semitic origins. When the bishop of Munster led the public protest against Nazi euthanasia, Bormann called for him to be hanged. In 1941, he said that "National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable."


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: In January 1934, Hitler appointed Alfred Rosenberg the Reich's cultural and educational leader. A neo-pagan, the notoriously anti-Catholic Rosenberg was editor of the "Völkischer Beobachter". In 1924, Hitler chose him to oversee the Nazi movement while he was in prison (possibly because he was unsuitable for the task, and unlikely to become a rival). In "The Myth of the Twentieth Century" (1930), Rosenberg described the Catholic Church as a primary enemy of Nazism. He proposed replacing traditional Christianity with the neo-pagan "myth of the blood":


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: Church officials were disturbed by Rosenberg's appointment, Hitler's endorsement of Rosenberg's anti-Jewish, anti-Christian, neo-pagan philosophy. The Vatican directed its Holy Office to place "The Myth of the Twentieth Century" on its Index Librorum Prohibitorum on 7 February 1934. Rosenberg reportedly had little or no influence on government decisions, and was marginalized; Hitler called his book "derivative, pastiche, illogical rubbish".


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: After Ludwig Müller's failure to unite Protestants behind the Nazi Party in 1933, Hitler appointed his friend Hanns Kerrl as minister for church affairs in 1935. The relatively-moderate Kerrl confirmed Nazi hostility to Christianity in an address during an intense phase of the Kirchenkampf:


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: Hitler became involved with the fledgling Nazi Party after World War I. He set the movement's violent tone early, forming the paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA). Catholic Bavaria resented rule by Protestant Berlin; although Hitler initially saw its revolution as a means to power, an early attempt was fruitless. Imprisoned after the 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch, he used the time to produce "Mein Kampf"; he claimed that an effeminate Jewish-Christian ethic was enfeebling Europe, and Germany needed a man of iron to restore itself and build an empire. Hitler decided to pursue power through "legal" means.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: Following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the Nazis and the Communists made substantial gains in the 1930 federal election. The Nazis' largest gains were in the northern Protestant, rural towns; Catholic areas remained loyal to the Centre Party. The Nazis and Communists pledged to eliminate democracy, and they shared over 50 percent of the Reichstag seats. Germany's political system made it difficult for chancellors to govern with a stable parliamentary majority, and the chancellors relied on emergency presidential powers. From 1931 to 1933, the Nazis combined terror tactics with conventional campaigning; Hitler crisscrossed the nation by air while SA troops paraded in the streets, beat up their opponents and broke up their meetings. There was no middle-class liberal party strong enough to block the Nazis. The Social Democrats were a conservative trade-union party with ineffective leadership; the Centre Party maintained its voting bloc but was preoccupied by defending its own interests, and the Communists engaged in violent street clashes with the Nazis. Moscow had directed the Communist Party to prioritise the destruction of the Social Democrats, seeing them as more dangerous than the German Right who made Hitler their partner in a coalition government.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: The coalition developed slowly; the Centre Party's Heinrich Brüning, Chancellor from 1930 to 1932, was unable to reach terms with Hitler and governed with the support of the president and the army rather than parliament. With the backing of Kurt von Schleicher and Hitler's approval, the 84-year-old Paul von Hindenburg (a conservative monarchist) appointed Catholic monarchist Franz von Papen to replace Brüning as chancellor in June 1932. Papen was active in the resurgence of the right-wing Harzburg Front, and had fallen out with the Centre Party. He hoped, ultimately, to outmaneuver Hitler.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: After the July 1932 federal elections, the Nazis were the largest party in the Reichstag. Hitler withdrew his support for Papen, and demanded the chancellorship; Hindenburg refused. The Nazis approached the Centre Party to form a coalition, but no agreement was reached. Papen dissolved Parliament, and the Nazi vote declined in the November 1932 federal election. Hindenburg appointed Schleicher as chancellor, and the aggrieved Papen came to an agreement with Hitler. Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor on 30 January 1933, in a coalition between the Nazis and the DNVP. Papen was to serve as vice-chancellor in a majority-conservative cabinet, falsely believing that he could "tame" Hitler. Papen spoke out against Nazi excesses and narrowly escaped death in the Night of the Long Knives, when he ceased to openly criticize Hitler's government. German Catholics greeted the Nazi takeover with apprehension, since leading clergy had been warning about Nazism for years. A threatening, albeit sporadic at first, persecution of the Catholic Church in Germany began.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: The Nazis began to suspend civil liberties and eliminate political opposition after the Reichstag fire, excluding the Communists from the Reichstag. In the March 1933 federal elections, no one party received a majority; Hitler required the Reichstag votes of the Centre Party and the Conservatives. He told the Reichstag on 23 March that Positive Christianity was the "unshakeable foundation of the moral and ethical life of our people", promising not to threaten the churches or state institutions if he was granted plenary powers. With typical negotiation and intimidation, the Nazis called on Ludwig Kaas' Centre Party and the other parties in the Reichstag to vote for the Enabling Act on 24 March 1933. The law would give Hitler the freedom to act without parliamentary consent or constitutional limitations.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: Hitler dangled the possibility of friendly co-operation, promising not to threaten the Reichstag, the president, the states, or the churches if granted emergency powers. With the Nazi paramilitary encircling the building, he said: "It is for you, gentlemen of the Reichstag, to decide between war and peace". Hitler offered Kaas an oral guarantee to maintain the Centre Party and autonomy for the church and its educational and cultural institutions. The Centre Party, promised non-interference in religion, joined with the conservatives in supporting the act; only the Social Democrats opposed it. The party, the Bavarian People's Party and other groups "voted for their own emasculation in the paradoxical hope of saving their existence thereby". Hitler immediately began abolishing the powers of the states and dismantled non-Nazi political parties and organisations. The act allowed Hitler and his cabinet to rule by emergency decree for four years, although Hindenburg remained president. It did not infringe on presidential power, and Hitler would not achieve full dictatorial power until Hindenburg's August 1934 death. Until then, Hindenburg remained commander and chief of the military and retained the power to negotiate foreign treaties. On 28 March, the German Bishops' Conference conditionally revised the ban on Nazi Party membership.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: During the winter and spring of 1933, Hitler ordered the wholesale dismissal of Catholic civil servants; the leader of the Catholic trade unions was beaten by brownshirts, and a Catholic politician sought protection after SA troopers wounded a number of his followers at a rally. Hitler then called for a reorganization of church-state relations; by June, thousands of Centre Party members were incarcerated in concentration camps. Two thousand Bavarian People's Party functionaries were rounded up by police in late June 1933, and it ceased to exist by early July. Lacking public ecclesiastical support, the Centre Party also dissolved on 5 July. Non-Nazi parties were formally outlawed on 14 July, when the Reichstag abdicated its democratic responsibilities.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: The church concluded eighteen concordats, beginning in the 1920s, under Pius XI to safeguard its institutional rights. Peter Hebblethwaite noted that the treaties were unsuccessful: "Europe was entering a period in which such agreements were regarded as mere scraps of paper". The Reichskonkordat was signed on 20 July 1933, and ratified in September of that year; it remains in force. The agreement was an extension of existing concordats with Prussia and Bavaria by nuncio Eugenio Pacelli, including a 1924 state-level concordat with Bavaria. It was "more like a surrender than anything else: it involved the suicide of the Centre Party ...". Signed by Hindenburg and Papen, it realized a church desire since the early Weimar Republic to secure a nationwide concordat. German breaches of the treaty began almost immediately; although the church repeatedly protested, it preserved diplomatic ties with the Nazi government.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: From 1930 to 1933, the church had limited success negotiating with successive German governments; a federal treaty, however, was elusive. Centre Party politicians had pushed for a concordat with the Weimar Republic. Pacelli became the Vatican Secretary of State responsible for the church's global foreign policy in February 1930, and continued working toward the "great goal" of a treaty with Germany. The Vatican was anxious to reach an agreement with the new government despite "continuing molestation of Catholic clergy, and other outrages committed by Nazis against the Church and its organisations". When Papen and Ambassador Diego von Bergen met Pacelli in late June 1933, they found him "visibly influenced" by reports of actions against German Catholic interests. Hitler wanted to end all Catholic political life; the church wanted protection of its schools and organisations, recognition of canon law regarding marriage, and the papal right to select bishops. Papen was chosen by the new government to negotiate with the Vatican, and the bishops announced on 6 April that negotiations on a concordat would begin in Rome. Some Catholic critics of the Nazis emigrated, including Waldemar Gurian, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and Hans Ansgar Reinhold. Hitler began enacting laws restricting the movement of funds (making it impossible for German Catholics to send money to missionaries), restricting religious institutions and education, and mandating attendance at Sunday-morning Hitler Youth functions.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: Papen went to Rome on 8 April. Outgoing Centre Party chair Ludwig Kaas, who arrived in Rome shortly before him, negotiated a draft with him on behalf of Pacelli. The concordat prolonged Kaas' stay in Rome, leaving his party without a chairman; he resigned his post on 5 May, and the party elected Heinrich Brüning under increasing pressure from the Nazi campaign of Gleichschaltung. The bishops saw a 30 May 1933 draft as they assembled for a joint meeting of the Fulda (led by Breslau's Cardinal Bertram) and Bavarian conferences (led by Munich's Michael von Faulhaber). of Osnabrück and Archbishop Conrad Grober of Freiburg presented the document to the bishops. Weeks of escalating anti-Catholic violence had preceded the conference, and many bishops feared for the safety of the church if Hitler's demands were not met. The strongest critics of the concordat were Cologne's Cardinal Karl Schulte and Eichstätt's Bishop Konrad von Preysing. They noted that the Enabling Act established a quasi-dictatorship, and the church lacked legal recourse if Hitler decided to disregard the concordat. The bishops approved the draft, and delegated Grober to present their concerns to Pacelli and Kaas.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: On 14 July 1933, the Weimar government accepted the Reichskonkordat. It was signed six days later by Pacelli for the Vatican and von Papen for Germany; Hindenburg then signed, and it was ratified in September. Article 16 required bishops to take an oath of loyalty to the state; Article 31 acknowledged that although the church would continue to sponsor charitable organisations, it would not support political organisations or causes. Article 32 gave Hitler what he wanted: the exclusion of clergy and members of religious orders from politics. According to Guenter Lewy, however, members of the clergy could theoretically join (or remain) in the Nazi Party without violating church discipline: "An ordinance of the Holy See forbidding priests to be members of a political party was never an issue; ... the movement sustaining the state cannot be equated with the political parties of the parliamentary multi-party state in the sense of Article 32." The government banned new political parties, turning Germany into a one-party state.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: The Reichskonkordat signified international acceptance of Hitler's government. Robert Ventresca wrote that it left German Catholics with no "meaningful electoral opposition to the Nazis", and the "benefits and vaunted diplomatic entente [of the Reichskonkordat] with the German state were neither clear nor certain". According to Paul O'Shea, Hitler had a "blatant disregard" for the agreement; its signing was, to him, the first step in the "gradual suppression of the Catholic Church in Germany". Hitler said in 1942 that he saw the Reichskonkordat as obsolete, intended to abolish it after the war, and hesitated to withdraw Germany's representative from the Vatican only for "military reasons connected with the war" Pope Pius XI issued "Mit brennender Sorge", his 1937 encyclical, when Nazi treaty violations escalated to physical violence., although he was probably mindful of the fact that just a few years before the war, in 1933, at least 40% of all Germans were Catholics, making it politically unpalatable to start a public and open conflict with the Vatican and which had led to the Reichskonkordat in the first place.


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: A threatening, but initially sporadic, persecution of the church followed the Nazi takeover. The Nazis claimed jurisdiction over all collective and social activity, interfering with Catholic education, youth groups, workers' clubs and cultural societies. "By the latter part of the decade of the Thirties, church officials were well aware that the ultimate aim of Hitler and other Nazis was the total elimination of Catholicism and of the Christian religion. Since the vast majority of Germans were either Catholic or Protestant this goal was a long-term rather than short-term Nazi objective". Hitler moved quickly to eliminate political Catholicism, and the Nazis arrested thousands of Centre Party members. The Bavarian People's Party government was overthrown by a Nazi coup on 9 March 1933, and the dissolution of the Centre Party in early July left Germany without a Catholic party for the first time; the Reichskonkordat prohibited clergy from participating in politics. Anton Gill wrote that "with his usual irresistible, bullying technique", Hitler proceeded to "take a mile where he had been given an inch" and closed all Catholic institutions whose functions were not strictly religious:


title: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

text: The Nazis promulgated the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, a sterilization law which was offensive to the church, shortly before the Reichskonkordat was signed. Days later, the dissolution of the Catholic Youth League began. Political Catholics were targets of the 1934 Night of the Long Knives purge: Catholic Action head Erich Klausener, Papen speechwriter and adviser Edgar Jung (also a Catholic Action worker), and Catholic Youth Sports Association national director Adalbert Probst; former Centre Party chancellor Heinrich Brüning narrowly escaped death. William Shirer wrote that the German people were not aroused by Nazi church persecution. Most were not moved to face death or imprisonment for the freedom of worship. Impressed by Hitler's early foreign-policy successes and the restoration of the German economy, few "paused to reflect that the Nazis intended to destroy Christianity in Germany, and substitute old paganism of tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists." Anti-Nazi sentiment grew in Catholic circles as the government increased its repression.