Chapter VI: The Priests

One of the most significant books that was given to me during my recent tour of Europe was a bound volume containing the names and addresses of 2,700 expelled priests who were uprooted from their parishes in 1945, 1946 and 1947. None of these Catholic priests had been accused of crimes of any sort. Most of them were simple pastors of country and city parishes whose aim was the spiritual welfare and eventual salvation of their flocks. Many of them had suffered at the hands of the Gestapo.

And yet, when the theory of mass expulsion on a racial basis was applied to such areas as Pomerania, East Prussia, Danzig, and Silesia and the Sudetenland, these men of God were thrust from their parish churches, from their rectories, and joined the nearly 12 million expellees who trekked through the heart of Europe as uprooted pilgrims of the night. And they still are joined to the lot of the disinherited, for they live among them in daily service, in daily sacrifice.

The book to which I refer has been printed by the Seminary for expelled seminarians located in Koenigstein, near Frankfurt. It lists the former dioceses of the priests, their date of ordination, and their present whereabouts in Western Europe. We see in this book listings of priests ranging from young men who were just ordained to priests ninety years of age.

Some of the priests as members of such religious orders as the Franciscans and Augustinians were generally accepted by the houses of their orders in Western Germany. The vast majority of these expelled priests were simple pastors and they have gone out among their people who were expelled with them. Their life differs little from that of any other homeless expellee.

I have known a priest to live in a single room of an old house, so as to be near the former slave labor barracks where the expellees from Silesia manage to exist. I have seen pictures taken by Caritas of the dwellings of other expelled priests; one priest from the Ermland diocese was able to get a little room in the attic of a resort hotel, a room which serves not only as his study, his sleeping quarters, and garage for his only means of transport, a bicycle, but also as his parish office where he receives his parishioners.

HOMELESS PRIESTS—THEIR FLOCKS DISPERSED

One of the burdens that lie most heavily on these expelled priests is the knowledge that their former parishioners are scattered throughout all the zones of Germany. These driven people had no choice as to their destination; or to be exact, they had no destination. To cite an example, Father Johannes Preuss, now located in Neumuenster, Schleswig-Holstein, reported that he had a parish of 700 souls in Nossberg, East Prussia. When the expulsion came, trains took his parishioners in different directions and he has received word from them from all four zones of Germany. The largest number of his parishioners landed in the Russian zone. He does not know how many of his parishioners were deported eastward to slave labor in Siberia, nor how many died on the roads and in the cattle cars during the expulsion. He does know that exhaustive efforts to find out how many of his parishioners are still alive resulted in a total of 450 out of 700. Father Preuss also gave us another significant figure: out of the ten priests fulfilling their ministry in the area of Gutstadt, (where his parish was located), seven were killed or deported and only three live to labor among their expelled flocks in Western Germany. The particular diocese of Ermland from which Father Preuss comes suffered possibly more than any other diocese in the loss of its priests and the loss of its faithful. About 40 per cent of its priests are dead or missing.

For all the inhabitants of East Prussia, Catholic and Protestant, the total of dead or missing comes to 1 out of every 5 people. This is the cost that is paid by human beings in general, the guilty and the innocent, the aged and the children, for mass expulsion.

A PRIEST IN SIBERIA

One of the priests of this Ermland diocese is now in the United States on a mission on behalf of the St. Boniface Society, the Church Extension organization of Germany. This young Ermland priest has told us in a calm, gentle way of his experience—experiences which are true, unfortunately, for other priests, and men and women.

Because of his opposition to Nazism, Father Gerhard Fittkau was forbidden to teach by the Gestapo, though he had earned his doctorate in theology and was needed as a professor in a Catholic High School. He was appointed as the young pastor of the parish of the Nativity of Our Lady, in Suessenberg, East Prussia. He had in his pastoral care a little flock of 91 families, numbering 460 people. They were in the main, the owners of well-kept farms, hard-working and orderly, but not rich—part of a Catholic enclave in a prosperous Protestant area.

He was there in January, 1945, when the Russian advancing army almost completely encircled the area of Central Ermland in East Prussia. Though tempted to flee, in the wake of many who had managed to get out before the arrival of the Soviet troops, Father Fittkau found in the sacrifice of the Mass, the strength to remain, though it might mean death or deportation. Every day he celebrated High Mass, and all the parishioners who remained, together with evacuees from other villages, prayed with great faith and devotion. The confessional was busy as never before. The instruction for Holy Communion was speeded up so that the little ones could also receive the Holy Eucharist; the Sacrament was carried to the old and the sick. For so many it was a viaticum, explains Father Fittkau, not only for the aged and ill, but for the young and the strong.

“When I consider,” says Father Fittkau, “all that God’s grace must have accomplished in those days of extreme distress, the price we had to pay was surely not too high. Could our parish ever have been led by any other means to such trust in God, to such resignation, and to such love?”

When the Soviet army entered Suessenberg, girls and women were immediately rounded up and taken away for “peeling potatoes for the soldiers.” They returned after being abused by the army men, broken-spirited and infected by disease. Father Fittkau was able to protect a group of several women and girls and a Grey Sister from such violation, though he came close to being executed for his deed.

Twenty-five villagers were murdered, including a seventy-three-year-old sacristan, the sixty-five-year-old church bell-ringer, the twenty-three-year-old girl organist, and four other girls under twenty-five. Six priests of the surrounding area were executed.

After burying the bodies of his dead parishioners in the hard-frozen earth, Father Fittkau had to register at the newly set-up Red Army headquarters. There, he met three elderly priests who had been herded in from the neighborhood. The four of them were sent as a special detail to go out into the fields and gather for a common grave the bodies of about fifty murdered civilians—bodies already partly mauled by animals. Before their task was fully done, the priests were arrested and marched by the Soviet Secret Police to a cellar in a neighboring town. Many civilians were locked up in other cellars of the same town and were not allowed out of the improvised cells even for any of nature’s needs. (This was a common Soviet prison procedure.)

Finally in March of 1945, two months after the arrival of the Red Army, the prisoners knew their sentence—the deportation to Siberia for slave labor. About 2,500 men and women from the area were sent off at the same time. Forty-eight other men and boys, ranging in age from 14 to 73, were in the dark, ice-cold car with Father Fittkau for a 21 day journey, which included stops at Moscow and Kotlas for delousing. The journey continued until they reached a forced labor camp near Pechora in the Tundra near the Arctic Ocean. When the freight car was opened at the destination, seven of the forty-nine men had already died. Father Fittkau staggered with the men into a large compound, filled only with bare, snow-covered barracks. Around the compound was a ten-foot wooden fence. Four large watch towers stood at each corner of the camp. It seemed as though most of the inmates of this compound had died, but the few who were left were led off shortly after Father Fittkau arrived. They were Poles and Ukrainians who had been deported to Siberia in 1940 and 1941, when between one and one-half and two million innocent men, women and children of Polish nationality were brutally uprooted from their homes for forced labor.

“They were ragged, prematurely old, pitiful human creatures,” says Father Fittkau, “the remnants of those poor people who had been removed to this forced labor district when Stalin shared Poland with Hitler.”

Father Fittkau worked with other men, and many deported women with shaved heads and men’s garments, on the earth works and timber-works for a canal. One of his only sources of comfort was the companionship of a Protestant minister. Together, they tried to force their worn out minds to hold on to spiritual realities while men, reduced to a vegetative existence, fell and died in the snow around them.

At the end of the first month, a quarter of all the inhabitants of the compound had already died. The unfortunates who could not work, but also could not die, were sent farther north to a so-called barracks hospital, where little could be done for them in the way of medical aid. They were observed by a specialist, however, for the signs of degeneration due to lack of vitamins and general malnutrition.

With his legs and feet swollen from weakness and hunger, and his entire body marked with abscesses and eczema, Father Fittkau waited for death, but unexpectedly, on the Feast of Our Lady of Ransom, he was freed, and added to the first batch of freed laborers that would be returned to Germany.

Recovering in a half-destroyed hospital in Berlin, he learned of the expulsions from the East. The flock of his little parish of Our Lady’s Nativity were now homeless wanderers, mostly in the Soviet Zone of Germany. The poor little village had been scattered, says Father Fittkau, “from the Urals and uttermost reaches of Siberia, to the Rhine.” From letters and reports, he estimates that scarcely half of his former parishioners are still alive.

Father Fittkau stresses that this story of the dispersal of a parish is nothing exceptional—but rather the typical story of the atomization of thousands of parishes since the end of the war.

As soon as he had recovered, Father Fittkau was placed in charge of the Chancery of the late Bishop Maximilian Kaller. In this work, he was thrust into the heart of all Expellee problems since Bishop Kaller was named by the Holy Father as Bishop of all Expelled Catholics in Germany.

Father Fittkau wants to make known the sufferings of the priests of the disinherited, so that special help can be sent to them to aid them in their holy and heroic tasks. He wants to make known, too, his strong feeling for the reconciliation of all Christians, especially former enemies, who have suffered so much that they should have no hatred left—only love and compassion.

UPROOTED CATHOLICS WITHOUT CHURCHES

One of the least understood problems concerning the expellees is that of the Catholics who were expelled into the Protestant areas of Germany, where there are neither churches, parish centers, nor schools. Here the task of the homeless priest is made a thousand times more difficult, because he must find places to say Mass and he must find ways of getting to his poverty-stricken flock. They cannot come to him over great distances because they lack means of transportation and money. They lack strength often to walk the miles necessary to reach the town center where Mass is being said. There are three Catholic dioceses in Germany which have received in the last few years, hundreds of thousands of destitute Catholics whose spiritual and material needs are overwhelmingly great. The two dioceses of Osnabrueck and Hildesheim in the north of Germany found their Catholic populations increased almost overnight by more than a million Catholics. These dioceses, which are located in the predominantly Protestant areas of Germany and which have received so tremendous an influx of Catholics, are known as the Diaspora dioceses. The diocese of Paderborn was also affected in this way as well, as we will make clear later.

The diocese of Osnabrueck extends all the way up to the Danish border and includes within its area the entire province of Schleswig-Holstein which juts out into the Baltic and North Sea. Schleswig-Holstein has been since the 16th century an almost wholly Protestant area. As a result of the mass expulsion, the population of this province rose from 1,500,000 to 2,700,000. The Lutheran expellees from East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia came into an area where their spiritual needs could be met in some measure by the local Lutheran churches and Lutheran Pastors. The thousands upon thousands of Catholic expellees found themselves living not only in material misery in wooden barracks and in rooms in back of barns, but in the deepest spiritual misery because of the lack of the consolations of religion. Bishop Kaller immediately stationed more than sixty-five expelled priests in the area of Schleswig-Holstein. These devoted men were helped by the Lutheran Pastors who gave them the use of their Lutheran Churches to say Mass, and by local public authorities who allowed them to say Mass and to give instructions in public schools on Sundays and in the evenings. The Bishop of Osnabrueck has also transferred some of his best equipped priests to this area to help in the organization of new parishes. Several wooden churches and parish centers have already been erected.

The efforts of the priests to cover great tracts of territory are supported by the work of selfless women, who trudge on foot, or go by bicycle, to teach Catechism in the most remote settlements. A group of young women have even grouped themselves into a new society to meet the needs of the times. In a barracks on a lonely section of Schleswig-Holstein, they pray and study to prepare themselves for their apostolate as pastors’ helpers.

I sent one of the delegates of War Relief Services up to Schleswig-Holstein to make a special survey of the struggles and needs of these priests, and among other reports, I received one on the typical Sunday of an expellee priest in Schleswig-Holstein.

It might be well to mention in this connection that the Diaspora area of the Lutheran expellees is in Bavaria and Southern, predominantly Catholic, Germany. Here the Lutheran homeless find themselves without churches. Their pastors often use Catholic halls and establishments to give the ministrations of their belief to Lutheran expellees. One sees them on their bicycles moving over the roads of Munich and the southern German countryside on their visitations. I am sure that studies have also been made of the struggles of these Pastors, but I would like to present to you this living picture of a priest and a pastor, who in the dark night of exile, tries to keep alive the light of faith.

ALMOST NEVER OFF HIS MOTORCYCLE

Father Francis Motzki, the report states, was an expellee from the diocese of Ermland in East Prussia, who was sent in 1946 by Bishop Kaller to care for the souls of the expellees in northwestern Schleswig-Holstein.

He found a room in the town of Bredstedt. It is a little room which contains besides his bed, his desk, his clothing, his work table, his book case, and his parish supplies, a locked tabernacle on the wall which contains the body and blood of the Lord of all the world. Father Motzki works and eats and receives his local parishioners in this one room. As there is no Catholic Church in the town of Bredstedt, he must keep the Most Blessed Sacrament in this tabernacle so that he will be ready to go to the sick and dying when called.

Catholic expellees are located in camps and villages all around Bredstedt, and Father Motzki says Mass in eight different places and gives religious instructions to children and young people in thirteen places. Though he is well under forty, he looks like an older man. He is almost never off the motorbike on which he commutes between the various places where he gives instructions and visits his parishioners. He has recently developed a serious kidney ailment but cannot curtail his work for souls.

He has known great personal tragedy, since one of his sisters was deported for slave labor in Siberia, in 1945, and was never heard from again. A second sister was also deported, but was returned to Germany in 1948. She rented a room in the same house, and prepares Father’s meals and acts as housekeeper for his furnished room.

I came early one Sunday morning to the town of Bredstedt where Father Motzki said his first Mass in the Lutheran Church at 7:45 in the morning. He had a full congregation consisting solely of expellees. Because there was a three-hour interval before his next Mass, Father Motzki was allowed to take liquid refreshment—some hot coffee. After his cup of coffee, Father Motzki set out for his second Mass station at Lutjenholm. This was in a public school. When he arrived the women from the nearby expellee barracks were already there and the teacher’s desk was covered with clean linen and with fresh flowers for the celebration of the sacrifice of love. Most of the congregation at this Mass were grown-ups. Confessions, heard in the open hallway of the school, preceded the Mass, which began at 11:30 o’clock.

Immediately after the second Mass, Father Motzki proceeded to Bargum and arrived there in time to say his third Mass in a school at 1 P.M. There were many camps in the vicinity, and the school room was crowded with a congregation that consisted of more than half young people. The clean linen and the flowers just picked from the fields were already there, and one could see the joy with which these forsaken people welcomed the priest of God. At this Mass Father Motzki delivered a special sermon for the children and young people, because a large number of them were to be confirmed on the following Thursday by the Bishop of Osnabrueck. The confirmation of these and all the other children of the entire area would take place in the Lutheran Church of Bredstedt.

Father Motzki reminded the children what confirmation meant as the strengthening of the faith of the Christian to meet the trials of the world and to resist sin. He explained to them the entire ceremony, including the making of the sign of the Cross with the chrism, and the slap on the cheek by the Bishop as a reminder to each child that it is his duty to accept trials for Christ.

CHILDREN WHO KNEW CHRIST’S CROSS

“It may be,” said Father Motzki, “that I have not been able because of the difficulties of our life here to instruct you adequately in all the aspects of the faith for your Confirmation. It may be that there are many points about Catholic doctrine that I could have taught you more thoroughly, my beloved children. When the Bishop makes the sign of the Cross first with the holy oil on your forehead and then over you, I know that you will understand what he means by it. You know so well, though you are only children, what the Cross means in our life of every day. You are homeless, you are exiled from your farms and your home towns. You must go out without shoes, and you have known terrible hunger. You understand all these things. You know the way of the Cross!

“And so, when the Bishop, who represents to you Christ himself, makes the Cross over you, you will know from your own sufferings, not from my teaching, what Christ meant by the Cross.

Confession in the school hall.
]

“Oh Mary, help us all, out of the depth of our need.”
]

Though he may be hungry and tired, the Expellee priest is a tower of
strength to the people whom he visits in their barracks homes.
]

Father’s fourth Sunday Mass in a Lutheran Church.
]

“When the Bishop slaps each one of you on the face to remind you to be willing to suffer for Christ’s sake, you must remember to offer up willingly all the suffering of your own bodies and of your family for Christ. He took His Cross and offered His life for each one of us.”

After the Mass the children and young people joined in singing the beautiful and touching hymn of Maria Hilf. As they sang, “Oh Mary, help us all, out of the depth of our need,” it was clear from their faces and from their sad voices that they knew what the Cross really meant, and also what it meant to accept the trials of the world.

There were tears in the eyes not only of the Expellees but also of the War Relief Service delegate as this hymn was sung.

NO FOOD BEFORE EVENING

Father Motzki then visited some of the sick and aged in the nearby barracks. I could not help but notice as we drove along throughout the day, following Father’s route, how rich and lovely was the countryside, with its flat, well-cared-for fields, fine barns, and neat little cottages. Everywhere we saw the magnificent cattle for which the area is famous. Every now and then, we would pass an impressive establishment, owned by a larger landowner, and we would admire the tremendous, solid brick barns. By contrast with all this comfort and solidity, the clusters of unpainted, greyish-brown wooden barracks in which so many of the expellees lived seemed even more desolate and forlorn.

After his visits, Father took to the road again and headed for the town of Langenhorn, where at 3 o’clock in the afternoon he said his fourth and last Mass of the day in a Lutheran Church, kindly lent to him by the minister. The main aisles of the church were filled and many people went to communion, particularly younger people and children. Again Father Motzki gave his sermon on confirmation and again the voices of children who knew the misery of separation and homelessness filled the building.

At 6 o’clock that evening Father Motzki was back in Bredstedt and sitting down to his first solid food of the day.

TO SAVE A WHOLE GENERATION

You who read may think that this case is very unusual. It is not at all. Other priests go through the same heart-breaking schedule, covering regularly six thousand three hundred Mass stations in Lutheran churches, movie houses and schools, only because they want to save a whole generation for the Church. Priests know that men and women and children who have been deprived of everything may become bitter and cynical if they are not given the consolations of religion. It is only to prevent the loss of a whole generation in the Diaspora areas, that the expellee priests, like true apostles and true pilgrims, wear out their strength in saying Masses and giving instructions over wide areas. In the province of Schleswig-Holstein alone there are 341 Mass stations for the expellees where 83 priests say Mass as often as is humanly possible. Already young priests have died under the strain of this schedule. This is an area where Catholic relief from America can play a vital role in saving for the Church a whole generation, a generation of the uprooted, of the disinherited.

Our Lord has put so often into our hands here in the United States the bounty that we can share so that these children, so deeply wounded by separation and suffering, may not also be disinherited from the Kingdom of the Lord.