Therese Neumann vs the Third Reich

Strange Familiars

This episode explores the life and controversial legacy of German mystic Therese Neumann, specifically focusing on her existence during the Third Reich.

Key takeaways

• The Konnersreuth Circle functioned as an actual Nazi resistance group centered around Neumann's community.
• Paramahansa Yogananda visited Neumann in 1935, experiencing a shared spiritual recognition during her ecstatic state.

Main topics

• Therese Neumann's stigmata and ecstasies
• Catholic resistance to the Third Reich

Notable quotes

I live by God's light.

Conclusion

The episode offers a compelling look at how spiritual phenomena and pe

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:07) I halted just inside the threshold, awestruck at a strange and most frightful sight. Blood flowed thinly and continuously in an inch-wide stream from Therese's lower eyelids. Her gaze was focused upward on the spiritual eye within the central forehead. Obviously, he's seeing this through his Hindu perspective. The cloth wrapped around her head was now drenched in blood from the stigmata wounds of the crown of thorns. The white garment readily splotched over her heart from the wound in her side. Therese's hands were extended in a gesture maternal and pleading. Her face wore an expression both tortured and divine. She appeared thinner, changed in many subtle ways as well as outward ways, murmuring words in a foreign tongue. She spoke with slightly quivering lips to persons visible before her. Speaker 4 (0:52) They claim their thoughts will just be treated as slightly different from what they are. We talk as if she thinks of her. Speaker 3 (1:26) Welcome to Strange Familiars and the third and final of our series on Therese Newman. with Brother Richard. If you haven't listened to the other two episodes, I recommend listening to those first. It does a nice layout of her life. This episode, we get into her controversy with the Third Reich and some of the things the critics said about Therese as well, and more. So without further ado, let's go ahead and get into it. Speaker 3 (2:09) Well, it's impossible to talk about her and sort of the elephant in the room is that she lived in Germany during the time of the Nazis. Can you speak to the general treatment and attitude toward German Catholics by the Third Reich at the time? Speaker 2 (2:27) OK, so generally, because it's a big it's a big question across the whole the whole of the Reich. From the beginning, the Nazis at the start wanted to try and bring the churches on board with them because they knew the churches socially had a lot of authority, a lot of power, etc. And felt that if they could at least get them going with them at the start, then, you know, whatever about later. at least at the start, it would kind of push people towards them. Very quickly, the churches, in their leadership at least, realized what was going on. And there was a turn against Nazism, and it began to be denounced as a philosophy in itself. It was denounced by the Pope at the time, and it was also denounced particularly by the bishops of the Netherlands. So they issued a very, very strong condemnation. And there were some in the church that didn't want them to go as far and as quickly because they felt it would bring down persecution on the ordinary Catholic in the street kind of thing. However, the bishops did, and most unusual for the time, they issued a joint statement with the Protestant authorities as well that basically said you could not be a Christian and be a Nazi. And that unleashed a wave of persecution. So the first wave was very, very strongly the Third Reich went after anybody who was of Jewish descent, even if they were Catholic or Christian. And this is where the martyrs, Edith Stein, for example, and her sisters were martyred at that point because of that, because they'd come from a Jewish family, but had chosen to become Christian themselves later in life. And so there's the famous story of when Maximilian Kolbe, the Franciscan friar who dies in Auschwitz, when he arrives in Auschwitz, the commandant at the time said to him that the first to die would be the Jews, the second to die would be the priests, in terms of the treatment that they would be given when they were there. So obviously, I'm not equating the Jewish situation with the Catholic, but I'm just saying that there was a level of hatred against the institutional church because of its defense of the poor and its defense of the Romani class and its defense of the Jewish people at that time as well. There is no question that there were compromised... pastors, priests, church communities, those who went with the Nazi philosophy as well across the board. This is not a one-size-fits-all story. But in terms of institutional movement, very quickly it was, this is wrong. So Bavaria was a very, very Catholic province of Germany. It was one of the very few provinces that had held on to its Catholicism even through the Reformation. So the Bavarian identity was very strongly a Catholic identity at the same time. They were very strong on it and the church would have had a lot of social influence in Bavaria. And now they have this problem. And the problem is Theresa Newman because everybody's coming from all over the place and people are invested in it. And the story is, insofar as there is kind of proof around it, is that Hitler himself was fascinated by her. Speaker 3 (5:48) He Speaker 2 (5:49) seems to have been fascinated and also frightened of her at the same time. And the worry was... that if she said anything that was anti-Hitler, would the Bavarian people go with her as opposed to going with the Reich? And so there was a lot of intimidation. Some of her family were arrested and were tortured. Two Speaker 4 (6:12) of Speaker 2 (6:12) her brothers. Two of her brothers, there we go. Yeah, were arrested and tortured by the Gestapo. The community lived under tremendous fear. as you can imagine. Her father was a veteran of the First World War, and that probably gave them a little bit of high standing Speaker 4 (6:26) because Speaker 2 (6:27) he was considered a very noble and upright man and a veteran. There was an order for her arrest issued towards the end of the war, but she was never arrested. Speaker 3 (6:40) And Speaker 2 (6:41) in fact, the story is that the soldiers arrived in the middle of one of the Passion ecstasies, and when they saw her in the full ecstatic bleeding state, they ran from the place. On one occasion, somebody handed her, amongst a bundle of other photographs of people to pray for, a photograph of Hitler. And quite publicly, she threw it on the ground and said that the smell of hell was around that man. Speaker 3 (7:04) And Speaker 2 (7:04) that's the only comment, as far as we know, that she ever made politically about him. But it's a fascinating thing. Obviously, as we all know, certain groups within the Nazis, within the Reich, were very fascinated by the supernatural, the occult, all of those kind of things. And there's no doubt that from a propaganda point of view, to be able to say that the mystic of Conor Soot was now on the side of the Reich would be really important. And so a number of newspaper stories were issued in official Reich newspapers to say that either she had affirmed the Nazi cause or when the family objected to that, that she had died. I think three or four times they issued her death notice. And people came flooding to her house to see whether she had died or not. And it was simply because they just wanted to get rid of her. They thought people would forget about her if they said this. Yeah, they tried to Speaker 3 (7:55) ridicule first. Then they stated that she supported Hitler. And then finally misreported her death. Yeah, they just didn't know what to do with her. Speaker 2 (8:03) No. And as they say, you know, there seems to have been huge fear of her and of the influence that she could have had or would have had. But, you know, I mean, as I say, her own family were tortured and attacked by the Nazis. So there certainly wasn't going to be support for them. Speaker 3 (8:20) I've seen reference to what's called the Connors-Ruth Circle many, many times. I knew this was a group of people around Therese. I just assumed it was like sort of the inner circle around her. And I was amazed to find like, no, no, this referred to an actual resistance group. She just happened to be associated with it because she was in Connors-Ruth and her brothers were in it. But this was a Nazi resistance group. that had formed in Conor's Ruth. Yeah, Speaker 2 (8:42) and Speaker 3 (8:42) it Speaker 2 (8:42) was also to protect her because one of the rumors was that the Nazis were planning to kidnap her. And on one occasion, one of the Nazi-affiliated local government individuals said, well, they would solve the question of Conor's Ruth forever if they could take her and examine her themselves. And her father knew exactly what that meant. It would have been execution. And so he absolutely refused. And they had to mount kind of guard outside the house for a number of evenings before. Eventually, they gave up trying to take her. What's really invidious, actually, is that the guy in question had this lovely comment about an injection or two will cure her, Speaker 4 (9:20) was Speaker 2 (9:20) the way he put it, which was obviously lethal injection. That was the end of that. As Speaker 3 (9:26) I was doing the research, the main book I was using was titled Therese Newman, A Stigmatist of Our Day. It was written by Friedrich Ritter von Lama, who's an Austrian Catholic journalist. As I'm doing the research, I found out he died. He was taken to prison in Dachau. He was transferred then to a prison, and he was hanged by the Nazis in 1944. Wore a rosary around his neck when he was executed. And his son died in Dachau. Yeah, extraordinary, extraordinary tragedy. Yeah, so it's literally, you know, the book I'm using as research, the guy who wrote it died in the concentration camp. Or, well, his son did. Speaker 2 (10:03) privilege in Poland actually of meeting some of our brothers who were the last of those who had actually been imprisoned in the concentration camps and survived. And there is a small little museum that the brothers hold themselves and one of the things that's present which was so poignant was that they had continued to minister to the people even in the prisons. And so it was illegal, like it was absolute execution immediately if they were found praying together or celebrating the mass. And so they had put together a little kit for celebrating the Mass, which in all of its pieces looked absolutely innocent. So the chalice was a thimble. The altar was a cigarette case, an empty cigarette case. They used, the local people would pass raisins through the fence to them that they would then make the wine with and small little fragments of bread because they were given bread to eat would be used. But again, each one of them held a separate piece of this so that if they were found, it was instant death. So, yeah, there was huge religious persecution of, I mean, not just the Catholics, but anybody who