Catholic in Nazi Germany
Marianne Smith shares a story of steadfast belief and courage in a dark time
By Rich Reece
“Through everything that happened to us, my mother stayed close to God. When it rained, she’d say, ‘Thank You for helping the flowers grow.’ When it thundered, she’d tell us children, ‘He’s warning us.’”
The speaker is Marianne Smith, a retiree and active parishioner at Sacred Heart Church in Southport, N.C. And “everything that happened to us” refers to her childhood in Germany during the years of Hitler’s rise and fall. For years friends asked her to write a book about that time in her life.
“I always said, ‘Perhaps I will.’ But when my grandson Matthew showed such an interest, I knew I had to do it.”
It took Marianne seven years, but now her memoir, written in the third person and titled On the Other Side, is providing more and more readers a glimpse of what it was like to grow up Catholic in Nazi Germany. In the mid 1930’s, Mariannne Bechtold was living with her brother, her mother and her grandmother in a small apartment in the beautiful resort town of Wiesbaden. Anna, as her family called her, was a happy, active child, but she sensed in her family the conflict that would divide her country. Her father was absent. No one knew where he was, but Anna would come to understand that he opposed the Nazis, and had gone into hiding to protect his family.
Anna’s mother saw clearly that the government was against all that her Catholic faith stood for. Yet her grandmother cheered on the Nazis and attended their rallies, believing that the Fuhrer would restore Germany to its rightful place in the world.
Several themes recur in Marianne’s story of “Anna’s” youth: Her mother’s faith and determination to do right; the government’s gradual campaign to eliminate all religion; the growing dangers for anyone who did not appear to support Hitler with enough enthusiasm; the coming of war with all its hardships; and, at the same time, the efforts of a loving, talented young girl to taste some of the joys of a normal childhood.
With the encouragement of Sister Renate, one of the nuns who staffed the orphanage near her church, eight-year-old Anna auditioned for a scholarship in singing, acting and dance through the government’s “Growing German Youth” program. As a result she won a spot in the troupe of the local opera house. Her success there led to recognition by some of the affluent patrons, who supported her entry into an elite riding academy. Riding and caring for the horses became one of the happiest parts of the young girl’s life.
But darkness was all around. In her book, Marianne recalls the spring Sunday in 1941 when, as usual, she and her mother walked to church. By this time her brother, Guenter, had been recruited by the army and was rumored to be somewhere on the Eastern front. The family didn’t know if he was alive or dead.
As they approached the church, soldiers on motorcycles roared by. The usual groups of people walking to Mass were absent. When they got to the door, they saw that it had been locked with a huge chain and padlock.
Her mother pointed to a bright yellow warning sign nailed across the huge wooden door… “Eintritt verboten!” (Entry Forbidden!) read the warning in black letters.
The pair hurried across town to the Cathedral, only to find that it too had been closed.
Did the German people not understand what was going on? Were they in denial? Today, Marianne says that was not the case. “At first,” she says, “people were just ignorant. When people disappeared, we were told they were going away for a brief time to a lovely camp and would be back in a few weeks.” Later, she says, as Hitler’s plan became more apparent, ignorance was replaced by fear. “If you were seen as opposing the Nazis,” Marianne says, “everyone knew that they would not hesitate to arrest you and your family, or even kill you.”
The campaign against the Catholic Church had begun years before that day the church was closed. Anna was particularly close to Sister Renate. One day she went to see the nun and instead saw trucks carting off the beds from the orphanage. The orphans and the Sisters were gone. She was told by an impatient young man with a swastika arm band to go home, that they had been “moved to another location, in the Black Forest, I believe.”
“We would play on the orphanage playground a lot,” Marianne recalls. “And the rectory was right there, so we could run and talk to the priests whenever we wanted. But suddenly they were invisible. Believe me, the priests who would not support the Nazis had a very hard time.”
Even with the churches closed, Anna’s mother was determined to keep the faith.
Locking the doors to God’s house brought out an anger Anna had not seen in her mother. “They cannot stop us from praying,” Anna’s mother contended. She swiftly draped their dining-room cupboard with a delicate linen runner. ‘Our statue of the Blessed Mother and three white candles will serve as our temporary altar,’ she announced. Anna knew that her mother acted on her words as she knelt daily in front of their new altar, and each Sunday morning she lit three candles.
On Sundays mother and daughter would also take walks through the nearby meadows. “They cannot refuse worshipping out in God’s nature,” her mother said. “The trees are budding, the birds are singing! Don’t you see? This is God’s greeting card! We do not need to look far to see his signs.”
As the German dominance in the war began to erode, the city experienced blackouts and frequent bombings from Allied forces. In the winter, Anna’s mother and grandmother would take a cart to the forest to gather firewood.
The end of the war brought incredible destruction to Germany, but a sense of liberation to Anna and her mother. Sister Renate had survived, Anna discovered, although her time in a concentration camp had left the nun very ill. And one night in 1946 at 2 a.m., Guenter knocked on the door of the family apartment. He had been captured by Russians and spent much of the war in a Siberian labor camp. He returned suffering what today would be labeled post-traumatic stress syndrome. In the ensuing weeks, his family lovingly nursed him back to health.
Anna never learned the identity or whereabouts of her father. Her mother passed away in 1986, her brother in 1993.
One might think that growing up in wartime Germany would qualify as the most difficult time of Marianne’s life. It wasn’t. Today Marianne calls the breakup of a 17-year marriage to “the love of my life” as a time “I really didn’t know if I would survive.”
By then she had been living in the U.S. for decades, and had been a successful realtor in Atlanta and Raleigh. She was a member of St. Michael the Archangel Parish in Cary.
“I asked Fr. Charlie Mulholland what I should do, and he said, ‘Find someone who is worse off than you.’ I told him, ‘I don’t know if there is anyone worse off’ – that’s how low I was – but I started helping out at the parish kitchen on Bingo nights.”
It was at this point in her life, though, that Marianne experienced what she calls today “a kind of miracle.” She discovered the Bible.
She joined a Bible Study Fellowhip (BSF) group in Cary. BSF is an international, interdenominational program for lay people devoted to structured Bible study. In a cycle of seven years of weekly meetings, the group covers the entire Bible. Marianne took the course twice, going every Monday night for fourteen years. The effect of Scripture on her life was dramatic.
“My mother’s faith was such a blessing,” she says. “Growing up, I knew about God. But after reading the Bible I felt I knew God.”
Marianne went on to share her knowledge by teaching Bible studies at St. Michael and later, when she retired to Oak Island, at Sacred Heart in Southport. Today she serves as a Eucharistic Minister and Reader at Sacred Heart, and is active in the parish Meals on Wheels program.
And, as she writes of Anna, “her passion to study the Bible, her love and hunger to know the Person her mother referred to so reverently as ‘Herr Jesus,’ continue to increase.”