Karl Veidt

Karl Veidt

Karl Veidt (born February 20, 1879 in Dörnberg , Unterlahnkreis , † August 10, 1946 in Wiesbaden ) was a German Evangelical Lutheran theologian and representative of the Confessing Church . From 1918 to 1945 he was pastor in Frankfurt am Main .

Life

Veidt first attended elementary school, then from 1892 to 1898 the high school in Montabaur and then studied Protestant theology in Marburg , Berlin and Halle . In 1902 he took up a position at the Berlin City Mission . In 1905 he came to Frankfurt am Main as a chaplain of the Inner Mission . From 1910 to 1912 he was chief editor of the Frankfurter Warte , an evangelical-national and anti-Semitic newspaper influenced by the spirit of Adolf Stoecker . From 1912 to 1914 Veidt was pastor at the Ringkirche in Wiesbaden .

During the entire First World War , Veidt served as a chaplain in the 21st Reserve Division of the German Army . He was awarded the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd Class and the Military Medical Cross.

In 1918 he was appointed pastor for the first time at the Paulskirche in Frankfurt , where he stayed until 1939, interrupted by a four-year appointment as professor at the Theological Seminary in Herborn (1925 to 1929). In 1939 Veidt, tired from the church fight in Frankfurt , moved to the Matthäuskirche in Frankfurt's Westend . In 1944 the church was destroyed in World War II and Veidt's official apartment was bombed out. He moved to Wiesbaden-Biebrich , where he served until his retirement in 1945. He died on August 10, 1946 in Wiesbaden.

Political activity

Veidt came from the Christian Social Movement and after 1918 initially joined the German National People's Party (DNVP), like many other representatives of the Protestant Church (including Otto Dibelius , Theophil Wurm and Johannes Kübel ). From 1919 to 1920 he was a member of the Weimar National Assembly and from May to December 1924 he represented the DNVP as a member of the Reichstag .

In 1929 he turned away from the DNVP in protest against Alfred Hugenberg's political course . Veidt strictly rejected the turn to National Socialism . He switched to the Christian Social People's Service , for which he was a member of the Prussian state parliament from 1932 to 1933 . His political career ended with the National Socialist seizure of power .

Veidt's role in the Confessing Church

As pastor of the Paulskirche, the main Protestant church in Frankfurt, Veidt had an exposed position in the Frankfurt regional church . Although he rejected National Socialism, he welcomed the national revolution and saw in it an opportunity for a Christian revival movement in Germany. On March 21, 1933 , Pastor Veidt preached to 2,000 visitors, including numerous police officers, in a service on the occasion of the opening of the Reichstag, the " Day of Potsdam ". He warned that the national movement must "sooner or later perish, ... if it does not get its supporting strength ... from Jesus and from the Gospel". "State, people and nationality belong in the realm of the ephemeral, while the starting point and end of the kingdom of God lie in eternity."

Against the synchronization of the Evangelical Church, z. B. the introduction of the Führer principle and the Aryan paragraph , which excluded the baptized Jews from any church office, he could not resolve to contradict. Veidt belonged to a group of nine in the Frankfurt Synod who abstained from the decisive vote on the new church constitution. He did not want to turn openly against the national state, which had achieved a lot. The church should contribute to national unity by creating the German Evangelical Church .

The further development soon after the seizure of power made him one of the leading representatives of the Pastors' Emergency League . From 1934 he was chairman of the state brotherhood council Nassau-Hessen of the Confessing Church and became one of the main figures of the church struggle in Frankfurt. At the end of May 1934 he took part in the Barmen Confessing Synod, at which the Barmen Theological Declaration was adopted. In the autumn of 1934 he was reprimanded by the church administration and transferred to another position. Veidt had protested against the compulsory merger of the three Evangelical regional churches of Frankfurt, Hesse and Nassau and opposed the appointment of the new regional bishop Ernst Ludwig Dietrich , a representative of the ethnic German Christians .

Veidt refused, however, to vacate his position at the Paulskirche. He sued the church leadership at the Frankfurt Regional Court and did not give up when he was forcibly prevented from entering the church by church and city authorities. On April 30, Veidt won his trial against the church leadership. The disciplinary measures were withdrawn, and from autumn 1935 Veidt was again allowed to officiate as Paulskirche pastor. Although he had successfully got through his fight against the regional church, he was exposed to increasing persecution by the Gestapo in the following years . Veidt was gag occupied and taken several times in prison. In 1939 he moved to the Matthäuskirche in Westend , where he witnessed the war and the destruction of the city.

His writings from this period show that despite the conflicts with the church leadership and the state and party organs, he essentially stuck to his German national sentiments. He welcomed the war against Poland in the Matthäusgemeinde newspaper as necessary " to protect our homeland and to fight for a secure future and sufficient living space for our people and fatherland ". In 1941 the false authentication of an ancestral passport brought him to prison for another four weeks.

In 1946 Veidt, already marked by illness, dictated his memoirs. In it he dealt critically with the failure of the Protestant Church before National Socialism. For himself personally he confesses complicity in the crimes against the Jewish fellow citizens: “ I saw once on a Sunday afternoon how all the inmates of a Jewish retirement home in the Niedenau, all bedridden people, were taken out and taken away in a truck. I did not have the courage to go and at least shake hands with some of the people and tell them that there were some who suffered with them and condemned what happened to them. I went home like a beaten dog. "

He interpreted the destruction of the Second World War indirectly as a result of the persecution of the Jews: when Frankfurt later sank piece by piece and we sat in the air raid shelter in the horror of death, I had to think of the history of the Old Testament, of that confession of guilt by the brothers Josefs: “We owe it to our brother that we saw the fear of his soul because he pleaded with us, and we did not want to hear him. That is why the tribulation is now upon us. "

literature

• Werner Becher (Ed.): Karl Veidt (1879-1946). Paulskirche pastor and member of the Reichstag . Publisher: Hessische Kirchengesch. Association, ISBN 978-3-931849-23-8
• Reiner Braun:  Veidt, Karl Daniel. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 26, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-428-11207-5 , p. 730 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Evangelical Regional Association Frankfurt (Ed.): Everything for Germany, Germany for Christ. Evangelical Church in Frankfurt am Main 1929 to 1945. Catalog for the exhibition from April 29 to July 12, 1985 in the Dominican monastery , Frankfurt am Main 1985, ISBN 3-922179-08-8
• Ernst Kienast (Ed.): Handbook for the Prussian Landtag , edition for the 5th electoral period, Berlin 1933, p. 392.
• Martin Schumacher (Hrsg.): MdR The Reichstag members of the Weimar Republic in the time of National Socialism. Political persecution, emigration and expatriation, 1933–1945. A biographical documentation . 3rd, considerably expanded and revised edition. Droste, Düsseldorf 1994, ISBN 3-7700-5183-1 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Karl Veidt in the catalog of the German National Library
• Karl Veidt in the database of members of the Reichstag
• Veidt, Karl Daniel. Hessian biography. (As of August 5, 2020). In: Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen (LAGIS).