In 1912 the Catholic lawyer, real estate speculator, and Center Party politician, Karl Trimborn wrote to his wife about a visit he had made to their Belgian relatives:

Their Catholicism, this demonstrative insistence on the Catholic point of view, this goingthrough thick and thin while excluding all criticism is not sympathetic to me. It encourages me to contradict them and to demonstrate my liberal point of view … In no way did we have an argument, but as we said good-bye, we knew: we are different people.

The intensive involvement with the German bourgeoisie (Bürgertum) during the past decade has found scholars busy pasting labels on a social group that they sweepingly termed the “bourgeoisie.” Yet, the studies of a number of German and Anglo-American scholars have focused mainly on the urban Protestant bourgeoisie, while the rural (small towns and villages with less than 5,000 inhabitants) bourgeoisie and the Catholic bourgeoisie have received little attention. Considering the fact that rural society still comprised one of the main features of the European landscape, and that Catholics were approximately one third of the population during the second half of nineteenth-century Germany, the neglect of this group becomes even more surprising. Is it possible to write the history of the German bourgeoisie without its countryside elements (Bürgertum auf dem Lande) and without its Catholic bourgeoisie? Can so prominent a sector of German society be this casually dismissed? This article seeks to examine the issue from a number of different perspectives. Using a regional survey, it will show the existence of a Catholic bourgeois stratum in southern Germany (largely in the rural areas) and, through the presentation of a regional model, it will also attempt to sketch, albeit in broad strokes, some of the more pertinent aspects of the German Catholic bourgeoisie.

In 1973 Yad Vashem, the international organization commemorating Holocaust martyrs and heroes, extended its highest honors to one of Germany's most influential business leaders. Berthold Beitz, head of the Krupp Foundation in Essen, was declared one of “the righteous among the nations” and was inducted into a very small group of individuals who had risked their lives to rescue Jews during the Third Reich. As a young manager in German-occupied Galicia, Beitz had been considered a rising star in the firm of Karpaten Öl. A trustee acting on behalf of the board of directors, Beitz was in a key position to witness the brutality of the SS in occupied Poland. In 1943, as he began to suspect his government's murderous intentions, Beits grew determined to risk his career, and possibly his life, to protect Jews from a tragic fate. Through various means of trickery and bargaining with the SS, Beitz took under his wing both young and old, skilled and unskilled, and employed them in scattered oil installations in eastern Galicia, ultimately protecting many of them from deportation and probable death in Belzec.