12 March 1938, Austria.

German troops move across the Austrian border without resistance and  by morning, armoured columns are moving through the streets of Vienna, greeted  by cheering crowds throwing flowers.

Swastikas appear on buildings overnight and  the independent Austria ceases to exist, absorbed into the German Reich in what Adolf  Hitler and Nazi Propaganda calls the Anschluss.

Austrian Jews are forced to scrub pavements  on their knees while crowds watch and laugh, political opponents are arrested within hours and  soon the concentration camp Mauthausen is created for the opponents of Nazi Germany.

The Catholic  Church, which had shaped Austrian public life for centuries, faces a moment of irreversible  choice: silence, resistance, or accommodation.

The most powerful churchman in the country,  the Archbishop of Vienna and Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, chooses accommodation.

Three days later he meets Hitler personally at the Hotel Imperial in Vienna and within a week he  will sign a declaration welcoming the annexation, adding beneath his own signature the words ‘Heil  Hitler’.

History will remember him by the nickname those two words earned him: the Heil Hitler  Cardinal.

His real name is Theodor Innitzer.

Theodor Innitzer was born on 25 December  1875 in Neugeschrei, now Czech Nové Zvolání, a small settlement near the town of Weipert in  Bohemia, then part of Austria-Hungary.

His father Wilhelm worked as a textile factory worker and  his mother Maria took care of the household and young Theodor.

The family had little money and  after completing the minimum required schooling, young Theodor was sent to work as an apprentice  in a textile factory.

His life might have remained there had a local parish dean not recognized his  intelligence and supported him in attending the Gymnasium, in the town of Kaaden, now the  Czech town of Kadaň.

This intervention by a churchman set the course of Innitzer’s entire  life.

In 1898 he entered a seminary in Vienna, then the capital of Austria-Hungary, and he  was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1902.

Innitzer proved to be an exceptional scholar.

He earned his doctorate in theology in 1906 and pursued an academic career at the University  of Vienna, where from 1913 he lectured about the New Testament.

He rose through the university’s  ranks and became head of the theological faculty and was elected rector of the university in 1928.

His years as rector were not without difficulty.

During this time, the activities of the National  Socialist German Student Union intensified sharply on Viennese campuses.

Innitzer banned  a commemorative event at the university marking the fifth anniversary of Hitler’s failed  1923 Beer Hall Putsch, an event that was to have been attended by leader Ernst Röhm,  one of the most prominent Nazis at that time.

Months later, after violent clashes broke out  between Nazi students and Jewish students, Innitzer banned the wearing of the brown shirt  on university premises.

The Nazis responded by launching a campaign against him, accusing  him of being a servant of what they called Jewish terror.

It was a charge that revealed how  clearly, they saw him as an obstacle in this time.

In September 1929, Innitzer was appointed  Federal Minister of Social Affairs in the Austrian government of Chancellor Johann Schober,  a position he held for a year.

He worked on reducing unemployment and improving conditions for  the poorest Austrians.

His commitment to social issues was genuine and rooted in Catholic  teaching on the dignity of working people.

In September 1932, he was consecrated Archbishop  of Vienna, the most senior position in the Austrian Catholic Church, and in March 1933 he  was elevated to Cardinal.

With this title and position, he became one of the most influential  men in the country.

In the 1930s, he was one of the few Western figures to protest against the  “Holodomor,” a famine in Ukraine orchestrated by the Soviets with the goal to destroy Ukrainians.

As a result, Innitzer launched an international relief effort for the victims of the famine.

On 20 August 1933, Innitzer published a powerful appeal on the front page of  the newspaper Die Reichspost which said: “Cardinal Innitzer calls on the world  to act against starvation in Russia.

” Innitzer was unable to change the murderous  Soviet campaign, but the attempt to sound the alarm reflected a man willing, at that  point in his life, to speak uncomfortable truths to those who did not want to hear them.

During the years of the Austrian authoritarian government of Engelbert Dollfuss and later  Kurt Schuschnigg, Innitzer supported an Austrian regime that had suspended parliament  and governed without democratic legitimacy but presented itself as a Catholic and patriotic  bulwark against both Nazism and communism.

When Germany occupied Austria on 12 March 1938 and  that bulwark collapsed overnight, Innitzer had no plan prepared for what came next.

The speed of  the collapse was total – within few hours after German troops entered Vienna and the structures  of Austrian independence had ceased to function.

On 15 March 1938, three days after  the German troops entered Vienna, Innitzer met Adolf Hitler at the Hotel Imperial.

Hitler made vague promises about respecting the position of the Catholic Church in the newly  annexed Austria and Innitzer appears to have believed that an accommodation was possible.

On  18 March, Innitzer and the other Austrian Catholic bishops signed a formal declaration endorsing  the Anschluss.

The declaration was organized by Gauleiter Josef Bürckel, the Nazi official  responsible for incorporating Austria into the Reich.

Innitzer signed it with the words ‘Heil  Hitler’ written in his own hand beneath his name.

The Nazi regime then distributed the declaration  across the entire German Reich as propaganda, without the bishops having consented to this use.

Innitzer’s endorsement carried enormous weight as Austria was an overwhelmingly Catholic country.

The highest representative of its Church had just blessed the annexation done by Nazi Germany.

The reaction from Rome was swift and furious.

Vatican Radio broadcast a vehement denunciation  of the Anschluss.

Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the Vatican Secretary of State who less than a year  later on 2 March 1939 would become Pope Pius XII, summoned Innitzer to Rome and made clear that  his declaration had been a catastrophic error.

Pacelli had been outraged by the statement.

He  made Innitzer sign a retraction issued on behalf of all the Austrian bishops, which stated that the  earlier declaration had clearly not been intended as an approval of anything incompatible  with God’s law.

The Vatican’s newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, reported pointedly  that the bishops’ original statement had been issued without the approval of the Holy  See.

The retraction was formally correct, but the damage was done.

The image of the  Heil Hitler Cardinal blessing Hitler’s seizure of Austria had already spread across Europe.

What followed in the months after the Anschluss made Innitzer’s initial accommodation look not  only morally wrong but also politically deluded.

The Nazi regime had no intention of honouring  any promises made to Austrian churchmen.

Despite the criticism from the Vatican, in April 1938,  Innitzer ordered all Austrian churches to fly the swastika flag, ring their bells, and pray  for Hitler, in honour of the Führer’s birthday.

Even these acts did not help – the Nazis  closed Catholic schools and institutions, suppressed Catholic newspapers and even arrested  members of the clergy.

The Church that Innitzer had hoped to protect by welcoming the new rulers  was being systematically dismantled around him.

By the autumn of 1938, Innitzer’s  position had shifted decisively.

He had watched the new regime strip away  everything he had hoped his cooperation might protect, and he had drawn conclusions from this  experience.

On 7 October 1938, he called a day of prayer at the Cathedral of St.

Stephen in Vienna.

Almost 9,000 people attended, the vast majority of them young.

In his sermon, Innitzer spoke with a  clarity that he had entirely lacked in the spring.

He told his packed congregation that in the  last few months they had lost everything and declared that there is just one Führer: Jesus  Christ.

The British newspaper ‘The Catholic Herald’ reported that his sermon had marked  the definitive end of the Cardinal’s attempt to establish a religious peace with the Nazis.

The regime’s response came the following day.

A mob of approximately 100 Nazis, among  them older members of the Hitler Youth, attacked the Archbishop’s Palace on St.

Stephen’s  Square.

They smashed furniture, hurled documents and files through the windows and set them on  fire in the street below.

The mob outside shouted: “Down with the clergy, send the Cardinal to a  concentration camp, traitor bishop” – the man they had celebrated in March as the churchman  who had welcomed the new Germany was now being called a traitor by the same movement.

It the end Innitzer was not sent to a concentration camp – he survived the attack on  his residence and continued in his position.

He became increasingly critical of Nazi  racial policy, offering what protection   he could to Jews facing deportation and  to the Catholic Roma of rural Austria.

During the Second World War, which started on 1  September 1939, when Nazi Germany attacked Poland, Innitzer´s palace became a place where  people in danger could seek help.

He wrote letters to authorities and made quiet  representations on behalf of individuals – his interventions even saved some lives.

Although  he was, in a sense, opposed to the Nazis, he openly supported the war against the  Soviet Union, which began in June 1941 and was accompanied by the mass murder of civilians.

The end of the war, which was in case of anti-bolshevism supported also by the cardinal,  brought destruction to Vienna.

When Soviet forces captured the city in April 1945, the Cathedral  of St.

Stephen was severely damaged by fire in the last days of fighting.

The building that was  the physical centre of Innitzer’s authority and of Catholic life in Vienna lay partially in ruins.

He  devoted much of his energy in the post-war years to its restoration, and the cathedral was reopened  in 1952.

After the war he worked to rebuild the Church institutions that had been stripped,  closed, and suppressed under years of Nazi rule.

Theodor Innitzer came from nothing and built,  through genuine intelligence and decades of devoted work, one of the most significant  positions in Austrian public life.

At the moment when his authority and his courage mattered  most, in the spring of 1938 when the question of how the Church would respond to the annexation  of his country could still shape what followed, he misjudged catastrophically.

He signed a  declaration with Heil Hitler and gave the Nazi regime the Catholic blessing it had no right to  expect.

The later courage of the October sermon, the shelter offered in his palace, the quiet  intercessions on behalf of the persecuted: all of it was real, but none of it was enough to  undo what those two words beneath his signature had done.

The Heil Hitler Cardinal died on 9  October 1955 in his own bed.

He was 79 years old.

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