assurance that the Church had the right to determine its own religious instruction, he successfully forced the Nazis to permit continued Catholic instruction in Catholic schools. It was one of the first instances where the Reichskonkordat was used by the Church against the government, which was one of the intentions of Pope Pius XI. In 1933, when the Nazi school superintendent of Münster issued a decree that religious instruction be combined with discussion of the "demoralising power" of the "people of Israel", Galen refused, writing that such interference in the school curriculum was a breach of the Concordat and that he feared children would be confused as to their "obligation to act with charity to all men" and as to the historical mission of the people of Israel. Galen often protested against violations of the Concordat to Hitler directly. In 1936, when the Nazis removed crucifixes from schools, Galen's protest led to a public demonstration. Together with Munich's Cardinal Faulhaber and Berlin's Bishop Preysing, Galen helped to draft Pope Pius XI's anti-Nazi encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (With Burning Concern) of 1937. In 1934, Bishop Galen began to attack the racial ideology of the Nazi regime, partly poking fun at it, partly critiquing its ideological basis as presented by the Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg. He declared it unacceptable to argue that Jewish authorship of the Old Testament diminished its authority, or that morality and virtue were in any way derived from the perceived usefulness of a particular race. In January 1934, he criticized Nazi racial policy in a sermon and, in subsequent homilies, equated unquestioning loyalty to the Reich with "slavery". He spoke against Hitler's theory of the purity of German blood. Bishop Galen also derided the neo-pagan theories of Rosenberg in The Myth of the Twentieth Century as perhaps no more than "an occasion for laughter in the educated world", but warned that Rosenberg's "immense importance lies in the acceptance of his basic notions as the authentic philosophy of National Socialism and in his almost unlimited power in the field of German education. Herr Rosenberg must be taken seriously if the German situation is to be understood." In retaliation, two senior SS officers visited Galen to pressure him into endorsing Rosenberg's doctrines publicly, threatening the confiscation of Church property and an anti-Catholic propaganda campaign. One of them was the future SS General Jürgen Stroop, who later recalled, "Bishop von Galen