Sunday mass and the village churchyard, 1937
Women in fur headdresses tend the graves, and the men of the parish stream out of a Gothic church door after mass, hats in hand.
Among wrought-iron crosses and polished stone memorials, women in long dark dresses and tall fur headdresses bend over the graves beside a church with pointed windows. When mass ends, the men of the parish file out through a Gothic doorway in the whitewashed wall, in loden jackets, dark suits and lederhosen, putting their hats back on; a few in uniform-cut tunics push out among them, and a man with a watch chain waits by a family grave.
In the spring of 1937 Pope Pius XI's encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, smuggled into Germany and read from every Catholic pulpit on Palm Sunday, had condemned the regime's breaches of the Concordat. In villages like this the church still held the Sunday; the party had to compete for it.
