German Catholic Church employed slave laborers (10/15/00)

German Catholic Church employed slave laborers

COLOGNE, Germany - The German Catholic Church has admitted that it employed slave laborers during the Nazi regime, reported the Catholic News Service (CNS).

According to a recent television program aired in Germany, slave laborers from Russia, Poland and Ukraine were employed in the farming operations of a seminary in Westphalia and a convent and an abbey in Bavaria.

Teresa Majewska described how she was 9 years old when she and her whole family were taken from Poland and forced to work at the Benedictine monastery in Ettal.

CNS reported that Caritas, the Catholic Church's national charitable agency, has posted an appeal on the Internet (www.caritas.de) calling on anyone who has evidence of slave labor to contact the organization.

In 1943, 26 Protestant and two or three Catholic parishes had built a camp for about 100 slave laborers employed mainly as gravediggers.

The Protestant Church in Germany, an umbrella organization for Lutheran, United and Reformed Churches, decided, as a result, to contribute $5 million to a new voluntary fund set up by the government and industry to recompense former slave laborers.

Calls are growing for the Catholic Church also to contribute to the fund. The government's international negotiator on slave labor, Count Otto Lambsdorff, said it was clear that Church institutions could not have run their operations during the war without slave laborers, since the country's male population had been drafted.

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