Fifty years ago Sheed and Ward published a book called Peace and the Clergy. It was attributed anonymously to ‘a German priest’ because its author, Fr. Francis Stratmann OP, a Dominican, was the persecuted leader of the German Catholic peace movement, Friedensbund Deutscher Katholiken. With about 40,000 members, this was one of the first organisations to suffer the full force of Nazi oppression. It had been dissolved by the Nazis on 1 July, 1933.

Stratmann was born in 1883 and ordained in 1912. After the First World War he had become a university chaplain in Berlin, and it was there that he had begun his struggle against National Socialism and for peace. His book, The Church and War, published in 1924, drew on Scripture, Catholic moral theology and papal pronouncements to challenge the justification of war. When, in 1936, Peace and the Clergy appeared, it was in its English translation. ‘A work of this kind cannot be published in Germany today’, the preface explained. Temporarily arrested by the Gestapo after the Friedensbund was banned, Stratmann survived the war by going into exile, first in Rome, and then to Venlo, in Holland, where he was working as chaplain to Jewish converts in the Sluis refugee camp when the Nazis invaded. Going into hiding, he was sheltered in the Flemish Dominican convent at Lint, in Belgium. In exile he kept a diary, later published, and, in addition to other books, wrote a five-volume work on The Saints and the State.