Joseph Emonds

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Laurenz Joseph Emonds (born November 15, 1898 in Erkelenz - Terheeg , † February 7, 1975 in Euskirchen - Kirchheim ) was a Catholic priest , pacifist , resistance fighter against National Socialism and Jewish volunteer .

Life

youth

Joseph Emonds came from a farming family. His parents were Peter Anton Emonds and Gertrud Peters, he was the eldest of three brothers. Joseph Emonds first attended the Progymnasium in nearby Erkelenz. In his class (Untersekunda) there were three Jewish classmates among the 19 students; Adolph Weinberg from Erkelenz, Walther Gottschalk and Ludwig Lichtenstein from Geilenkirchen. The gifted Joseph Emonds gave tutoring to finance his school days. From 1915 he attended high school in Mönchengladbach to do his Abitur here. From 1917 he had to take part in the First World War as a soldier , he was deployed on the Western Front. After the end of the war he was a lifelong pacifist, he rejected the Christian justification for a just war . In the course of the November Revolution of 1918, a workers' and soldiers ' council and a peasants' council were formed in Erkelenz , to which Joseph Emonds was elected as a representative of the peasantry.

Seminary

Joseph Emonds studied Catholic theology in Bonn from 1918 , during which time he lived in the Collegium Leoninum . He entered the Bensberg seminary of the Archdiocese of Cologne and was ordained a priest on August 13, 1922 in Cologne Cathedral by Karl Joseph Cardinal Schulte .

Chaplain

The first locations were as chaplain to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Aachen (1922–1924) and as vicar in Dormagen (1924–1926), where he was also spiritual curator at the hospital. He got to know the social hardship of the lower classes of the population. His commitment, especially for the workers, did not necessarily meet with the goodwill of the church superiors, which is why he was transferred to St. Peter in Cologne-Ehrenfeld for two years in 1926 . There he made contact with the religious philosopher Romano Guardini . He was in charge of a Quickborn group. He is said to have had contact with a group of critical young people who later became known as the Ehrenfeld group of Edelweiss pirates .

The following period saw him for ten years as a chaplain (vicar (?)) In St. Laurentius Essen - Steele , where he worked, among other things, as district president of the Catholic journeyman's associations (since October 1933 Kolping families ) for the city of Essen with the fall of the Weimar Republic and had to deal with the beginning of the National Socialist dictatorship . An early engagement for Jews , Social Democrats and Communists , for whom he obtained documents and passports and coordinated secret border crossings, earned him a special position of trust with many refugees, but at the same time earned him the special attention of the state security authorities. Since 1933 he has been under surveillance by the Gestapo , which subsequently created a personal file on him on January 31, 1935 , because since April 1934 at the latest, the offices had tried in vain to prosecute him for "harmful" statements in sermons and conversations, since he was considered to be "Hostile to the state" and as a "fanatical opponent of the movement" .

Pastor in Kirchheim

Because of the increasing endangerment of his person, Emonds was transferred as a pastor to the Eifel in the parish of St. Martinus in Kirchheim near Euskirchen . There, under less surveillance than in the big city, he was able to do more to help persecuted people. Through good contacts with a former fellow student from the seminary, who was meanwhile working as a member of the SS in the state police headquarters in Düsseldorf , he was regularly supplied with encrypted lists of Catholic clergymen, members of so-called mixed marriages and Jews who were to be transported to a concentration camp were intended. This enabled him to save many people from arrest and kidnapping.

Joseph Emonds was part of a group that hid Jews. In 1960 he spoke of a ring of people from the youth movement in a WDR film . The group was led by Countess Maria Elisabeth zu Stolberg (1912–1944). When she was killed in a bomb attack in Düren , Joseph Emonds took over the organization.

Even when a small Waffen-SS staff was housed in his house for some time in December 1944 , he hid the Barz couple from Düsseldorf in the attic of his parsonage and supplied them with food from the SS officers' inventory. The painter Mathias Barz was married to the Jewish actress Hilde nee Stein . They had previously been hidden by the artist Otto Pankok and his wife Hulda Pankok in Pesch near Nettersheim. The pastor was supported by his secretive housekeeper Anna Schürkes (1883–1971). She came from Etgenbusch near Erkelenz and had already run his household for him in Essen.

Dean

After the Second World War, Joseph Emonds was associated with the West German peace movement as a pacifist . He rejected rearmament and therefore maintained contact with their leading figures. He was friends with Gustav Heinemann , Klara Marie Faßbinder and Christa Thomas . The artist Heinrich Seepolt from Kirchheim made the woodcut Ego miles Christi St. Martinus at the suggestion of Joseph Emonds , a portrait that was used in the peace movement of the 1950s. In 1956 he was one of the founding editors of the papers for German and international politics .

From 1944 to 1975 Emonds was dean of the Bad Münstereifel dean's office ; In 1974 he was awarded the title of Papal Honorary Chaplain . He passed away a year later. Joseph Emonds found his final resting place in the priestly grave of the Erkelenz cemetery on Roermonder Strasse.

Commemorations and honors

  • In 1984 a secondary school in Kuchenheim was renamed Joseph Emonds School . In 2014 it was dissolved for demographic reasons.
  • In 2008 in Delhoven , City of Dormagen , the streets in a new development area were named after people from the resistance. One street was named Joseph Emond's Way .
  • In 2013, a new street on the Schulring next to the Erkelenz cemetery was given the name Joseph-Emonds-Hof in Erkelenz . On January 31, 2015, the street sign was ceremonially unveiled in the presence of the Emonds family. Then his grave was visited.
  • On March 22, 2015, a memorial plaque was placed on the old rectory in Kirchheim. Before that, a Catholic service had taken place in the church of St. Martinus on the subject of courage to resist , to which participants from all nine parishes of the pastoral care area Euskirchen-Erftmühlenbach had come after a star hike. At the end there was a lecture about the Jewish rescuer and pacifist in the parish hall.
  • On April 30, 2016, a street in Kirchheim was named Dechant-Joseph-Emonds-Weg . The street is in close proximity to the parish church of St. Martinus and opposite the former rectory. The path leads to the Catholic kindergarten, parish library and youth home.

Yad Vashem

Place of remembrance of the old slaughterhouse

Fonts

  • Home and earth. Friedrich Pustet, Regensburg 1936, 1938.
  • Belief and symbol. Friedrich Pustet, Regensburg 1936.
  • Boldness of the Heart, Saint Theresa of Lisieux . Schneider, Heidelberg 1949.

Movies

Literature (selection)

  • Life and work of the dean Joseph Emonds . Edited by the Joseph-Emonds-Schule / Kuchenheim community secondary school of the city of Euskirchen. Euskirchen o. J.
  • Hans-Dieter Arntz : Judaica: Jews in the Voreifel . Euskirchen 1983, pp. 456-459.
  • Hans-Dieter Arntz: Persecution of Jews and Help for Refugees in the German-Belgian Border Region , Euskirchen 1990, pp. 712–714.
  • Ulrich von Hehl : priest under Hitler's terror. A biographical and statistical survey. 3. Edition. Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 1996, Vol. 1, Col. 715 f.
  • H. Walter Kern: Silent Heroes from Essen. Resistance during the persecution 1933–1945. Published by the City of Essen and the Old Synagogue Essen, Essen 2014.
  • Hans-Dieter Arntz: Joseph Emonds - Jewish rescuer and pacifist from Terheeg. The Kirchheim dean Joseph Emonds is posthumously honored by Yad Vashem as “Righteous Among the Nations”. In: Writings of the Heimatverein der Erkelenzer Lande e. V. No. 30 (From the history of the Erkelenzer Land), Erkelenz 2015, pp. 146–167, ISBN 978-3-9815182-8-3 .
  • Project group Toni Marcus at the European School Erkelenz: Toni Marcus - A Jewish Catholic in Terheeg , in: in: Schriften des Heimatverein der Erkelenzer Lande e. V. No. 30 (From the history of the Erkelenzer Land), Erkelenz 2015, pp. 134–145, ISBN 978-3-9815182-8-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hubert Rütten: Jewish life in the former district, writings of the Heimatverein der Erkelenzer Lande e. V. Vol. 22, Erkelenz 2008, p. 240.
  2. ^ Progymnasium zu Erkelenz, report on the school year 1914–1915
  3. ↑ Erkelenzer Kreisblatt November 19, 1918
  4. ↑ Main State Archives Düsseldorf, RW 58: 46 838 and RW 58: 65 226
  5. ↑ History workshop ( Memento from January 21, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  6. ↑ http://www.rheinische-geschichte.lvr.de/persoenitäten/E/Seiten/JosephEmonds.aspx
  7. ^ Gravestone cemetery Venrath
  8. ↑ Rheinische Post 2015 .
  9. ↑ PDF of Pfarrnachrichten 11/2015 ( Memento of the original from April 4, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / gemeinden.erzbistum-koeln.de
  10. ↑ KStA.de ; Catholic parish of St. Martinus Kirchheim: Dechant-Joseph-Emonds-Weg. Street naming - background and information. Kirchheim 2013.
  11. ^ Emonds in the Garden of the Righteous , Kölnische Rundschau, August 19, 2013.
  12. ^ Holocaust memorial honors Emonds , Rheinische Post dated December 17, 2014.
  13. ↑ http://www.kulturserver-nrw.de/-/calendar/detail/11905552
personal data
SURNAME Emonds, Joseph
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Emonds, Laurenz Joseph (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German clergyman and resistance fighter against National Socialism
DATE OF BIRTH November 15, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Terheeg
DATE OF DEATH 7th February 1975
Place of death Kirchheim (Euskirchen)