Faith, Truth, and Defiance in the Shadow of the Third Reich

Dietrich von Hildebrand’s War Against Hitler

By Regis Martin

What does one do when faced with obvious and widespread wickedness?Are there protocols to consult that enable one precisely to know what ethical course of action to take? And how do these protocols work when so many of one’s own countrymen seem not to have noticed, or particularly to care, that awful things are happening on a grand scale, especially to the innocent?

There was nothing subtle about the threat posed by Adolph Hitler amid the rise of National Socialism and the terrors unleashed by the Third Reich. But because so few were willing to mobilize against it, the pathology was allowed to fester, so that by the time it had fully metastasized most of Europe had gone up in flames, leaving death and destruction in its wake.

However, there were those who, at the threatened nightfall, simply would not give in to the forces of darkness, even as they appeared to be everywhere on the march. Particularly not if the triumph of evil took place at the expense of good people doing nothing. Which is what usually accounts for the successes of the wicked. Still, there were, as I say, some few souls who would not acquiesce in the face of far-reaching evil. Not only had they seen enough of the nihilism and violence to know that great wickedness was in the saddle; they were resolute in their determination to try and put a stop to it. Diagnostic skills were not enough, in other words. What really needed to be done was to disabuse people of the illusion that accommodation was possible with Hitler and the fascist ideals of National Socialism, and so to prepare them to go out and fight the enemy.

Of these brave and noble souls, none was braver or nobler than Dietrich von Hildebrand, a fearless philosopher of Roman Catholic persuasion, who put his life at risk, along with all that was most dear to him, in the struggle against state-sponsored barbarism. My Battle Against Hitler is the story he tells, beginning as far back as 1921 when, at a peace conference in Paris, he openly denounced his own country’s invasion of neutral Belgium at the start of the Great War in 1914. For this effrontery he was not only vilified by the German press, but at once became a target for Nazi assassins, who would soon force him to flee his native city when, in 1923, Hitler attempted to seize power in Munich, the place where both he and the Nazi party were born.

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