arrest from 1941 until the end of the war. Documents suggest the Nazis intended to hang him at the end of the war. In a Table Talk from 1942, Hitler said: "The fact that I remain silent in public over Church affairs is not in the least misunderstood by the sly foxes of the Catholic Church, and I am quite sure that a man like Bishop von Galen knows full well that after the war I shall extract retribution to the last farthing". Despite Galen's opposition to Nazism and its racial theories, he nonetheless believed Germany was the last bulwark against the spread of atheist Bolshevism. Parts of a sermon he gave in 1943 are said to have been used by the Nazis to aid in the enlistment of Dutch men to voluntarily join the Waffen SS against the Soviet Union. Galen feared that German Catholics were being relegated to second-class status in Hitler's Germany and believed Hitler was missing the point that the Catholic Church and the state could be aligned against Bolshevism. Although von Galen boldly spoke out against Nazi policies and the euthanasia programme, historian Beth A. Griech-Polelle wrote that Galen remained silent on other issues such as the roundup, deportation and mass murder of Jews. German historian Joachim Kuropka dismissed this allegation as a "misjudgment". Kuropka, referring to Wilhelm Damberg's discovery which in his opinion had not received enough attention so far, pointed out that the diocesan leadership in Münster had instructed all its pastors in June 1938 to recommend a brochure against anti-Semitism titled "The Nathanael Question of Our Days" ("Die Nathanaelfrage unserer Tage") to all faithful to read. Kuropka also emphasized Galen's cordial personal relationship with Münster town rabbi Fritz Steinthal. According to Kuropka, while there was no evidence in church archives for the rabbi's statement made from memory that after the Kristallnacht, by order of Galen, prayers for the Jews were said in all the churches of the Diocese of Münster, Kuropka was able to cite confirmatory evidence from Rhineland Gestapo files. Kuropka emphasized the uniqueness of the brochure distribution and the prayer campaign in Galen's diocese of Münster. However, like other bishops, according to Kuropka, Galen missed the right time to "escape into the public eye" on the question of the persecution of the Jews, for which Galen later reportedly blamed himself by his own admission. Apart from official pronouncements on the