The lodges¶

This story was first told by my grandfather, and I did not remember all of it. Gaps have been filled from what could be found in journals, museums and archives, and where the record ran thin, by following my nose and asking questions.

In 1919 Germany had lost a war and was short of somebody to blame for it. The supply of potential culprits (people with other opinions and stances) to blame was ample, and some of them met in lodges. None of what followed waited for the move before it to finish.

Stigmatisation¶

After the defeat, the fall of the monarchy and the crises that followed, the idea of a “Jewish-Masonic world conspiracy”, reaching for world domination and answerable for the war and everything after it, spread through the nationalist right. The Austrian publicist Friedrich Wichtl argued, from sources picked at will and partly forged, that world Freemasonry had started the First World War to bring down the monarchies. The young Heinrich Himmler noted that it was a book “that explains everything and tells us against whom we have to fight”. Theodor Fritsch’s edition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in which the conspirators found lodges in every country, had appeared in 100,000 copies by 1933. In the late 1920s Erich Ludendorff, who had helped run Germany’s war, published The Annihilation of Freemasonry through the Disclosure of its Secrets.

Stigmatisation was only a first step, and for fifteen years it lived in pamphlets. After 1933 it moved into the language of government. Reinhard Heydrich called Masons, Jews and the political clergy “the most implacable enemies of the German race”, and in early 1934 the party’s chief judge ruled that Masons who had not left their lodges before 30 January 1933 could not join the party.

Self-purification¶

The second step, self-purification, the lodges took on their own. The conservative old-Prussian grand lodges had already left the federation of German grand lodges in 1922, to put distance between themselves and liberal, cosmopolitan Freemasonry and to prove their patriotic reliability; the Grand Lodge of Saxony followed in 1924. On 21 March 1933 the Saxon grand lodge telegraphed Hindenburg, Hitler, Goebbels and Frick to welcome “the national rising of the German people and fatherland” and to pledge, “in Christian-national loyalty”, to work with the government. In April, it turned itself into the German-Christian Order of Saxony, gave up Masonic forms and customs, and wrote into its statutes an Aryan paragraph that barred Jews from membership.

The Saxon state government’s view was that the change was “only an outward one”, and that nothing had changed in sense or spirit. Adaptation bought nothing.

The same offer was later made to members one at a time. In April 1938 Hitler amnestied rank-and-file members who renounced their former loyalties. Paying the price of being left alone confirmed that the tie had been the offence.

Ties as disloyalty¶

The third step needed no new law. Membership of something larger than the nation now read as loyalty to somebody else, and the lodges marked for persecution included those that “espoused tolerance and equality and had international connections”. In September 1934 a report of the SS security service still described the Masons as a “secret power” taking its place even inside Nazi organisations, and dissolved lodges regrouping under “disguised names”. Belonging to something larger made every member a possible agent of it.

In the Netherlands the Grand Master answered in public. In June 1940, weeks into the occupation, Hermannus van Tongeren, Grand Master of the Grand Orient of the Netherlands and a titular major general of engineers, defended his brothers in an open letter. He was arrested in October, taken to Germany, and died in Sachsenhausen in March 1941, about two weeks after he arrived.

Extra-juridical dissolution¶

The fourth step went round the courts. Hermann Goring, as Prussian interior minister, called on the lodges to dissolve “voluntarily”, each dissolution to be submitted to him for approval. On 28 October 1934 the Reich interior minister, Wilhelm Frick, defined the lodges as hostile to the state, which made their assets liable to confiscation. On 17 August 1935, citing the emergency decree issued after the Reichstag fire, he ordered every remaining lodge dissolved. Their property was seized under a law of July 1933 on confiscating assets “hostile to the people and the state”. Powers written for an emergency were used to clear out civil society.

Italy had already done it a decade earlier, and the Grand Master did it himself. A law of 26 November 1925 put associations under police control, and two days after the Senate passed it Domizio Torrigiani, Grand Master of the Grande Oriente d’Italia, dissolved every lodge of his obedience. In April 1927 he was arrested and sentenced to five years of police confinement, a year and a half of it on Lipari and the rest on Ponza. He died at his villa in San Baronto in the summer of 1932.

When Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, the step took only a day. From the day after the annexation Freemasons, like the Jewish population, were persecuted, robbed and sometimes murdered; the Grand Lodge of Vienna’s fortune was confiscated, its building wrecked, and its documents, library and ritual objects carried off. Richard Schlesinger, a lawyer and a member of Austria’s Supreme Court, had been its Grand Master since its founding in 1918. According to the Austrian Masonic Museum, he was tortured to death in a Gestapo prison.

Archives as weapons¶

The fifth step turned paperwork into a weapon. When a lodge closed it was ransacked for membership lists, library and archive. In Saxony the German-Christian Order tried, in August and September 1935, to lodge the old grand lodge’s archive and library with the state archive under a contract that would keep them closed. Such arrangements quickly proved unenforceable, and the deposit went ahead under the Gestapo’s direction and complete control. The registers were being asked for from the other side too, and from July 1935 every civil servant had to declare any former lodge membership on a detailed questionnaire.

France learned the method in a summer. Laws of 13 August 1940 and 11 August 1941 shut Freemasons out of public service in the broadest sense. From 12 August 1941 the Journal officiel printed the names, professions and addresses of former dignitaries, and a prefecture in Marseille reprinted its own region’s in a brochure of 300 copies. Historians disagree on the total: Robert Paxton counts 14,600 names published, Dominique Rossignol 18,000. The French obediences’ own account says the Vichy service for secret societies, installed in the Grand Orient’s building on the rue Cadet, identified some 60,000 Masons.

The registers outlived everybody who used them. Specialised units seized the French lodges’ archives in 1940, Soviet troops found them in the east of the Reich in 1945 and sent them to Moscow, and they came back to France in 2000.

Spectacle as policy¶

The sixth step was public instruction. Occupied Paris held an anti-Masonic exhibition in October 1940, and Brussels another in February 1941, both meant to ridicule Freemasons and direct hatred at them. In 1943 came the film Forces occultes, commissioned by the German propaganda office in occupied France and directed by Jean Mamy under the name Paul Riche, which set out to prove a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy. Fear was taught as a public service.

The tipping point¶

Two and a half years after Hitler took office, no lodge was left in Germany under any name. The two Saxon orders ended in August 1935, the last successor organisations of their kind, and the decree of 17 August finished the rest. The lodges had spent those years adapting: telegrams, new names, a Christian label, an Aryan paragraph. None of it stopped what was happening.

Nobody knows how many Freemasons ended up in the camps. The USHMM says the number is not known, since many arrested Masons were also Jews or political opponents, and that some were murdered. In the camp at Esterwegen, probably in mid-November 1943, Belgian resistance prisoners held under the Night and Fog decree found enough Masons among them, most of them in hut 6, to found a lodge, Liberte cherie. The guards were civilians, and in the daytime it was easy enough to gather men from different huts. Paul Hanson, its master, left the camp in February 1944 and was among the thirteen of its eighteen known members who died in deportation. Luc Somerhausen, who did much to turn a circle of friends into a lodge, was one of the five who came back to Belgium, in May 1945. In August, he wrote to the Grand Orient of Belgium asking it to recognise the lodge.

In Spain the method outlived the war that ended it elsewhere. After the civil war a law of 1 March 1940 made it a crime to belong to Freemasonry, and a special tribunal handled more than 64,000 cases in its twenty-three years, with dismissal from public posts and, for the higher degrees, twenty to thirty years in prison. It was abolished in December 1963.

In Switzerland the same question went to a popular vote in 1937, before any such point was reached, and the voters threw it out.