Campaigning Against Bolshevism: Catholic Action in Late Weimar Germany

Under the banner of ‘Catholic Action’, Pius XI called the laity during the interwar period to struggle for a worldwide ‘re-Christianization of society’. Whatever this meant in detail, a religious frontline against communism was an essential part of the papal programme. Catholic anti-communism was not just a reaction to anticlerical communist ideas, however; rather, it accompanied the development of communist and socialist parties in Europe from the very beginning. As I will show in this article through the example of the diocese of Berlin, this papal anti-communism fell on fertile soil in the Catholic milieu of the Weimar Republic, and especially so within Catholic Action. At the head of Catholic Action in Berlin was Erich Klausener, who would later become a prominent victim of the so-called Night of the Long Knives (30 June 1934), when Hitler had a number of his political opponents on both the right and left executed. As we shall see, though, the activists of Catholic Action saw their political enemy less in the ascendant Nazi Party and more in communist propaganda, which they tried to defeat with all the means at their disposal.