Early support of the Nazi regime

Gröber was an early supporter of Adolf Hitler's rise to power. He became a supporting member of the Schutzstaffel in 1933,^[3] adopted the regime's anti-semitic rhetoric^[4] and offered only mild, ineffectual objections to inhumane policies such as compulsory sterilization or the eugenicist murder of people with disabilities in Aktion T4. At the start of the war, he expressed hope that, "the extermination struggle against godless communism [would be] ruthless".^[5][6]

In April 1933, Gröber opined that resistance to the Nazi regime was the folly of the "Martyrs of Stupidity" („Märtyrer der Dummheit“).^[7] Thus Gröber wrote in an exhortation dated 8 November 1933 on the subject of the vote and plebiscite regarding Germany's withdrawal from the League of Nations, that it was a duty to the fatherland to show unanimity with one's fellow countrymen. Among the populace, his policy of cooperation gained Gröber the nickname of Der braune Bischof (the brown Bishop). Thus during the course of the subordination of provincial governments to the Nazi central government, he directed a congratulatory telegram to the National Socialist politician appointed as proconsul in Baden, Robert Heinrich Wagner, containing the following message: "At the mighty task which lies before you, I place myself as the chief shepherd of Catholics in Baden unreservedly at your side." At the diocesan synod in Freiburg from 25–28 April 1933, he advised the diocesan clergy: "no provocation and no useless martyrdom."

In the negotiations to conclude the Reich concordat between Germany and the Holy See, even the German Bishops' Conference was kept at arm's length until shortly before the accord, but Gröber was provided preparatory information for the negotiations through his friend, Centre Party president Msgr. Ludwig Kaas; he eagerly promoted the process and thereby isolated himself from his fellow bishops. On 3 June 1933 a joint pastoral letter appeared from the German Bishops' Conference, the drafting of which the bishops had entrusted to Gröber. It contained a statement that if the State would only respect certain rights and requirements of the Church, the Church would gratefully and happily support the new situation.

In August 1933 the Archdiocese of Freiburg published in its official newspaper, which was under Gröber's responsibility, a directive of the Baden Ministry for Culture and Education about offering the Hitler salute in religious instruction, and thereby officially sanctioned this behavior, which led to considerable outrage among the faithful of the diocese. On 10 October 1933 at a large Catholic event in Karlsruhe Gröber expressly thanked the "men of the government" for their appearance: "I will not betray any secret if I explain that in the course of the last few months the contacts of the Church government in Freiburg with the government in Karlsruhe have proceeded in the most friendly way. I also believe that I will not be betraying a secret, either to you or to the German people, if I say that I place myself unreservedly behind the new government and the new Reich."

The Baden Interior Minister Pflaumer honored the cooperation promised by Gröber and sent the following directive to police headquarters on 13 November 1933: "Forceful measures against Catholic clergymen outside the framework of the general laws are not permitted in the future." At the end of the year 1933 Gröber complained in a letter to the Cardinal Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli about priests critical of the regime, who had been taken into "protective custody" (Schutzhaft), that it had not always been possible to obtain from the clergy the intelligent reserve and opportune reflection that, under a full evaluation of the fundamental situation, protect individual clergymen from inconveniences.

Also in this time came his decision, together with a few men of the cathedral, to become a "supporting member" of the SS. He argued for "the national right to maintain the nation’s racial origin unpolluted and to do whatever is necessary to guarantee this end."^[3]

After the war Gröber explained this by saying that at the time the SS in Freiburg was considered the most decent organization of the Party.

In 1941 Gröber, whilst supporting attempts to help persecuted Jews, wrote in a pastoral letter that the sad state of the Jews resulted from the curse that they had brought upon themselves when they murdered Christ. Anton Rauscher has said that Catholic theology of the era reflected "a view of the Jews which provoked anti-Semitism on the one hand, while on the other undermining the ability to oppose it."^[8]

On Good Friday of 1941 he gave a sermon whose vocabulary came very close to the anti-Semitic vocabulary of the Nazi rulers:

"As a driving force behind the Jewish legal power stood the aggressive toadyism and malevolent perfidy of the Pharisees. They unmasked themselves more than ever as Christ's arch-enemies, deadly enemies.... Their eyes were blindfolded by their prejudice and blinded by their Jewish lust for worldly dominion." As for the "people" or, in his words, the "wavering crowd of Jews", the archbishop said, "The Pharisees' secret service had awakened the animal in it through lies and slander, and it was eager for grisly excitement and blood."

About Judas: "This unspeakable wretch... sits sycophantically at the Lord's Supper... at which Satan went into him... and placed him at the lead of the present-day servants of Judas.... In true Jewish fashion, he bargained with the high priests.... He [Christ] is betrayed with the sign of love bubbling over, with a smacking kiss from dirty Judas lips."

Finally at the scene of the Ecce Homo: "All the sympathy of the Jews is hidden under barbaric rawness. The beast has smelled human blood and wants to slake its wild-burning thirst with it.... At the same time the insane but truthful self-curse of the Jews screams: His blood come upon us and our children! The curse has been frightfully fulfilled. Unto this present day..."^[9]

On 15 July 1938, Britain's Catholic Herald reported that Groeber had released "An amazing document... giving a picture of the religious situation in Germany after five years of Nazi rule". The document protested a religious persecution of Catholics in Germany, detailing attacks on clergy, interference in the practice of the faith and operation of welfare organisations, confiscation of church property, restrictions on preaching the Gospel, and suppression of the Catholic press and Catholic education.^[10]

After the beginning of the organized killing of the mentally and physically handicapped, termed euthanasia, he protested in a letter to the Baden Interior Minister Pflaumer, and was the first of the German bishops to do so in writing, according to Schwalbach.^[11] On 1 August 1940, Gröber wrote to the head of the Reich Chancellery, and warned that the murders would damage Germany's reputation. He offered to pay all costs being incurred by the state for the "care of mentally ill people intended for death".^[12] He stopped short of any tactic that could be effective, however, leaving it to Clemens August Graf von Galen, bishop of Münster, to publicly oppose these murders at great personal risk.

Gröber held a protective arm over the German resistance worker Gertrud Luckner. Luckner organized, with the support of Gröber, an "Office for Religious War Relief" (Kirchliche Kriegshilfsstelle) under the auspices of the Catholic aid agency, Caritas. The office became the instrument through which Freiburg Catholics helped racially persecuted "non-Aryans" (both Jews and Christians).^[13] Luckner drove this relief effort, using funds received from the archbishop to smuggle Jews to Switzerland and communicate the conditions for Jews to the outside world. She personally investigated the fate of the Jews being transported to the East and managed to obtain information on prisoners in concentration camps, and obtain clothing, food and money for forced labourers and prisoners of war.^[14] Luckner was arrested by the Gestapo in November 1943, and imprisoned at Ravensbrück concentration camp.^[13]

The Kreisau Circle formed from around 1937 as one of the few clandestine German opposition groups operating inside Nazi Germany.^[15][16] Though multi-denominational, it had a strongly Christian orientation. Its outlook was rooted both in German romantic and idealist tradition and in the Catholic doctrine of natural law.^[17] Among its central membership were the Jesuit Fathers Augustin Rösch, Alfred Delp and Lothar König.^[16] König acted as an intermediary between the group and Conrad Grober.^[18]

Response to persecution of priests

On the other hand, he is still reproached to this day on the ground that he had not sufficiently supported the suffragan bishop Johannes Baptista Sproll who was driven out of his diocese of Rottenburg as early as 1938.

Gröber wrote a still controversial letter to the president of the Volksgerichtshof (People's Court) Roland Freisler, who had sentenced to death Max Josef Metzger, a priest of his diocese:

Esteemed Mr. President of the People's Court!

At this moment I am receiving the news of the proceeding that led to the death sentence of my diocesan priest Dr. Max Metzger. I lament most deeply the offense of which he has made himself guilty. If I depicted him as an idealist in my message addressed to Attorney Dr. Dix, this happened without any knowledge on my part of his criminal undertaking. I consider it important to share this with you, because it is utterly foreign to me to include his actions in the realm of idealism, as I depicted him.

While part of the literature considers this letter as a last-ditch approach used as a tactical measure, in order to obtain the conversion of the death sentence into a prison term, another part of the literature considers it a cowardly distancing from a man sentenced to death on invalid grounds. Yet source criticism is necessary here: other documents from those days show that Gröber in fact did take steps to gain a mitigation of the penalty. Thus it is clear Gröber believed that only by recognizing the grounds for the judgment could he have even a minimal chance of success vis-à-vis Freisler.

On 12 November, Gröber informed his diocesan clergy of the sentence against Metzger, with, among others, the following words:

This thoroughly sad case should teach us insistently that we refrain painstakingly from everything and anything that could hurt our Fatherland in any way in its difficult hour, and could hurt ourselves as well; that we honor, gratefully and prayerfully, the enormous sacrifices and successes of our soldiers in the field; strengthen the courage of our faithful in the homeland [...], consider the frightful disaster of a lost war with Bolshevistic consequences, and daily ask God... to protect our homeland and bless it with an honorable internal and external peace.

In the aftermath of the war

Yet the bitter confrontations from the Nazi era remained: Gröber tried to silence an event for the so-called "concentration camp priests", initiated by Pastor Wilhelm Köhler and Richard Schneider, who was the first diocesan clergyman taken to the Dachau concentration camp in 1940, although 5 of the 16 clergymen from Gröber's diocese imprisoned in the camp were murdered.

The "concentration camp priests", like the priests of the Münster diocese who were honored in a solemn way in a pontifical service by the bishop of Münster, wanted to commemorate their dead confreres and impress upon the public consciousness that the latter must not be allowed to have died in vain. The priests expressed the reproaches made against them in a resolution: "We are saddened when even now we have to hear from the clergy that we had only our own foolishness to blame, that we were victims of the Gestapo. We find it hard to avoid the impression that a priest was better liked by the church administration, the less he came into contact with the Secret State Police."