"The Bitterest Times of Our Existence": Catholic Sisters in Hitler's Germany

This paper examines the relationship between the National Socialist state and Catholic sisters in Catholic congregations across.  Because of their conspicuous presence in the public sphere, Catholic sisters posed a particular problem for the regime increasingly hostile to the Catholic church. Between 1933 and 1939, the state implemented a series of economic and legal measures in an effort to erode the economic viability of religious congregations and remove Catholic sisters from their professions. But these congregations fulfilled important functions in the modern nation state. Replacing thousands of sisters working as nurses, for instance, proved impossible. The women’s continued presence in professions as teachers, nurses, teachers and social workers escalated the conflict between the Nazi regime and the Catholic church, not least because their daily routines frequently intersected with Nazi ideological and criminal measures such as forced sterilization, antisemitism, and the euthanasia program.

The second part of this paper focuses on how Catholic sisters responded to the Nazi regime. As these women religious attempted to cope with mounting political and economic pressures, their behavior marked a complex mixture of obedience to secular authorities, painstaking compliance with state policies, steadfast patriotism, unwavering humanitarianism, and moments of defiance. Finally, this paper examines how the outbreak of war led to a shift in the relationship between female Catholic congregations and the state. Under the cover of war the regime intensified its measures against Catholic sisters, but the sisters also received more opportunities to evade the grasp of the regime as their labor became increasingly indispensable to the German state. In large part, this paper is based on previously unexamined sources from private archives of German Catholic congregations.