Adalbert Probst

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Adalbert Probst (around 1932).

Adalbert Probst (born July 27, 1900 in Regensburg ; † July 2, 1934 ) was a German political activist and youth leader. Probst was best known as the Reichsführer of the DJK and as one of those killed in the " Röhm Putsch ".

Live and act

Probst was the son of the Bavarian army paymaster Franz Probst (1855–1922). He spent his childhood and youth in Regensburg until 1901, where his father was assigned to the 11th Infantry Regiment as paymaster , and then in Ingolstadt , where his father was transferred that year as accountant for the 13th Infantry Regiment . After attending school, Probst completed a commercial apprenticeship. From 1917 he took part with the Bavarian Army in the First World War, in which he was deployed on the Western Front . During the revolutionary turmoil that followed the German defeat in the war, he belonged to a volunteer corps .

In the first post-war years Probst lived in Munich , Eggenfelden and Ingolstadt. During this time he was active in nationalist and anti-republic circles. Some sources even claim a temporary affiliation to the early Nazi movement, for which there is no evidence so far. In 1922, Probst fled across the border to Austria for unexplained reasons - allegedly because of political offenses . Almost nothing is known about the following years of his life. Only Probst's marriage to Katharina Fischer (1904–1997) on September 28, 1925 in Neuhaus am Inn , a town directly on the Bavarian-Austrian border, is documented. The marriage resulted in a son, Franz (* April 8, 1926, † January 12, 1945 in Slovakia ).

In the second half of the 1920s, Probst found himself deeply religious. As a result, he broke off his relations with nationalist and ethnic organizations and began to get involved in the field of political Catholicism .

In 1929, Ludwig Wolker brought Probst to the service of the Catholic Young Men Association (KJMVD) in Düsseldorf . In the following years he rose to be the leader of the Catholic youth movement in the Rhineland and as such became a "respected figure in public life". He also wrote for the Catholic magazines Die Wacht and Deutsche Jugendkraft .

In 1932 Probst was appointed representative (speaker) for the so-called "off-road sport", which was controversial in its pre-military orientation. In December 1933, Probst was appointed Reichsführer der Deutschen Jugendkraft (DJK), the umbrella organization of the Catholic gymnastics and sports clubs, whereby the DJK gave up the previous Preses leadership principle (priestly leadership) in the face of the emerging conflict with the Nazi state .

There is still a certain amount of uncertainty about the National Socialists' motives for murdering Probst. Lewis evaluates Probst in her study on the Hitler Youth as "one of the youth leaders" who would have rivaled the Hitler Youth for the younger generation, and implicitly suggests that Probst was eliminated by the regime as a competitor in the fight for the younger generation. In contrast, Probst's mother said that her son, who was in contact with many high-ranking Nazi politicians, had been killed because he “knew too much”. Edmund Forschbach also points out that Probst played a role in the conservative coup plans of the group around Edgar Jung in 1933/1934: Probst is said to have had contacts with the conservative opponents of the regime through his friend Johannes Schauff . According to Forschbach, in the months leading up to June 30, 1934, he played a “mediator role” between the Reichswehr on the one hand and the St. Sebastian Rifle Brotherhoods on the other. It was about a possible uprising of conservative forces against the Nazi dictatorship, in which the Reichswehr would also have participated. The St. Sebastian riflemen should have taken action against SA and SS units in the Rhineland, which the Reichswehr was not allowed to enter due to the provisions of the Versailles Treaty . According to Forschbach, Probst would have had to organize the handover of weapons and equipment for this fight by the Reichswehr to the St. Sebastian rifle clubs.

On June 30th or July 1st, 1934, Probst was arrested in Braunlage in the Harz Mountains while he was visiting President Wolker. On June 30, July 1 or July 2, he was shot “while trying to escape”. Probst's corpse was cremated regardless of the dead man's Catholic faith (the Catholic Church at that time still officially refused to cremate the dead) . The ashes were sent to his wife a few days after he was killed, who had not yet been informed of her husband's death.

While some sources attribute the men who arrested him to the Gestapo, others say that Probst was arrested by SS men. Alvarez and Graham again restrict themselves to briefly labeling the murderers as "Heydrich's agents".

The murder of Probst as someone who was “completely uninvolved” in the political power struggles in the state is often used as evidence of the self-exposing character of the murder from June 30th to July 2nd. Usually it is argued that the fact that the National Socialists not only liquidated their real - or conceivable - power-political rivals during the "Röhm Putsch", but also murdered completely harmless people like Probst, should have been a warning sign to the Germans of which one The nature of the Nazi regime and its rulers were.

Evaluation by posterity

After 1945, Adalbert Probst was repeatedly tried by the Catholic Church as an exemplary “victim of totalitarian violence” of the Nazi regime. Since the "Probst case" was officially treated as "non-existent" by the Catholic Church in Germany until 1945, it was later repeatedly cited by its critics as exemplary evidence of the failure of the church leadership in dealing with the Nazi system. What weighed particularly heavily was that the church leadership did not even speak out against crimes committed against members of the Catholic Church. Reinhold Billstein, for example, complained in 1979 that the church's silence on the Probst case was “an example of the opportunistic behavior of the Catholic church leadership towards the Nazi dictatorship”.

literature

  • Barbara Schellenberger: Adalbert Probst (1900-1934). Catholic youth leader - victim of National Socialism. In: Düsseldorfer Jahrbuch. Contributions to the history of the Lower Rhine. Vol. 69, Düsseldorf 1998.
  • Helmut Moll (publisher on behalf of the German Bishops' Conference), witnesses for Christ. Das Martyrologium des 20. Jahrhundert , Paderborn et al. 1999, 7th revised and updated edition 2019, ISBN 978-3-506-78012-6 ; Volume I., pp. 392-394.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Joel Colton: The Twentieth Century , p. 169.
  2. ^ Brenda Ralph Lewis: Hitler Youth. The Hitler Youth in Peace and War, 1933–1945 , 2000, p. 45. The DJK had just under 150,000 members.
  3. ^ Dieter Marc Schneider: Johannes Schauff, 1902–1990. Migration and "stabilitas" in the age of ... 2001, p. 67.
  4. ^ Edmund Forschbach: Edgar Jung . 1984, p. 128.
  5. ↑ Hans-Peter Görgen: Düsseldorf and National Socialism. Study on the history of a… 1969, p. 110. Werner Klose: Generation in lockstep. The Hitler Youth. A documentary report . 1964, p. 230.
  6. ↑ To indicate June 30th as the day of death: The German people accuse . Hitler's war against the peace fighters in ... , 1936, p. 272, Carl Diem: World history of sport and physical education . 1960, p. 612, and Edmund Forschbach: Edgar J. Jung a conservative revolutionary . S. 86. Give July 1st as the day of death to Karl Heinz Jahnke: Dr. Joseph Cornelius Rossaint (1902-1991). From his life and work . 1997, p. 30, Inge Sbosnky / Karl Schabrod: Resistance in Solingen. From the life of anti-fascist fighters . 1975, p. 56, and Felix Dietrich, Reinhard Dietrich: Bibliography of German magazine literature . S. 1159. Thomas Stramm, Jürgen Elvert [Hrsg.] Name July 2nd: Geschistorbilder. Festschrift for Michael Salewski on his 65th birthday . 2003, p. 287.
  7. ^ Henri Daniel-Rops: A Fight for God, 1870-1939 . 1966, p. 320. Also J. Derek Holmes: The Papacy in the Modern World, 1914–1978 . 1981, p. 107.
  8. ^ Walter Laqueur: Young Germany. A History of the German Youth Movement . 1962, p. 213. Arno Klönne: Against the current. Report on the youth resistance in the Third Reich . 1960, p. 73.
  9. ↑ Inge Sbosnky, Karl Schabrod: resistance in Solingen. From the life of anti-fascist fighters . 1975, p. 56.
  10. ^ David J. Alvarez, Robert A. Graham: Nothing Sacred. Nazi Espionage Against the Vatican, 1939-1945 . 1997, p. 88.
  11. ↑ Fritz Meyers: The baroness in the protective coat. Emilie von Loe in the resistance against D ... , 1975, p. 100.
  12. ^ For example, as early as 1949 on the occasion of the 72nd German Catholic Convention in Mainz: The Christian in Need of Time . 1949, p. 302. Or also in American Benedictine Academy: The American Benedictine Review: Ut in Omnibus Glorificetur Deus . 1950, p. 498: "Catholicism had its first prominent martyrs."
  13. ^ Reinhold Billstein: The other Cologne. Democratic traditions since the French Revolution . 1979, p. 356.
personal data
SURNAME Probst, Adalbert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Reichsführer of the DJK
DATE OF BIRTH July 27, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH regensburg
DATE OF DEATH July 2, 1934