to establish a national underground network to assist Jews through the Catholic aid agency Caritas. Using international contacts she secured safe passage abroad for many refugees. She organized aid circles for Jews, assisted many to escape. Arrested in 1943, she only narrowly escaped death in the concentration camps. Social worker Margarete Sommer counselled victims of racial persecution for Caritas Emergency Relief and in 1941 became director of the Welfare Office of the Berlin Diocesan Authority, under Lichtenberg, and Bishop Preysing. She coordinated Catholic aid for victims of racial persecution—giving spiritual comfort, food, clothing, and money and wrote several reports on the mistreatment of Jews from 1942, including an August 1942 report which reached Rome under the title "Report on the Exodus of the Jews". Even at the height of Hitler's popularity, one issue unexpectedly provoked powerful and successful resistance to his regime. This was the programme of so-called "euthanasia"—in fact a campaign of mass murder—directed at people with mental illness and/or severe physical disabilities which had begun in 1939 under the code name T4. By 1941, more than 70,000 people had been killed under this programme, many by gassing, and their bodies incinerated. This policy aroused strong opposition across German society, and especially among Catholics. Opposition to the policy sharpened after the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, because the war in the east produced for the first time large-scale German casualties, and the hospitals and asylums began to fill up with maimed and disabled young German soldiers. Rumours began to circulate that these men would also be subject to "euthanasia," although no such plans existed. Catholic anger was further fuelled by actions of the Gauleiter of Upper Bavaria, Adolf Wagner, a militantly anti-Catholic Nazi, who in June 1941 ordered the removal of crucifixes from all schools in his Gau. This attack on Catholicism provoked the first public demonstrations against government policy since the Nazis had come to power, and the mass signing of petitions, including by Catholic soldiers serving at the front. When Hitler heard of this he ordered Wagner to rescind his decree, but the damage had been done—German Catholics had learned that the regime could be successfully opposed. This led to more outspoken protests against the "euthanasia" programme. In July, the Bishop of Münster, Clemens August Graf von Galen (an old aristocratic conservative, like many of the anti-Hitler army officers), publicly denounced the "euthanasia"