Adolf Bertram

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Adolf Cardinal Bertram (1916)
Bertram's cardinal coat of arms from 1930
Cardinal coat of arms (until 1930)

Adolf Johannes Cardinal Bertram (born March 14, 1859 in Hildesheim ; † July 6, 1945 at Johannesberg Castle near Jauernig ) was a German theologian , first Bishop of Hildesheim , later Archbishop of Breslau .

Life

Adolf Bertram was born on March 14, 1859 in Hildesheim and baptized on March 29, 1859 in St. Magdalenen . His parents owned a shop for linen, beds and trousseau in Hildesheim . From 1869 to 1877 he attended the Josephinum grammar school in Hildesheim.

From 1877 Bertram studied Catholic theology at the University of Würzburg and the University of Munich and joined the Catholic student association Unitas-Hetania at the start of his studies . He was ordained a priest on July 31, 1881 in Würzburg , and celebrated his first session on August 7, 1881 in Hildesheim's St. Magdalenen Church. He then studied canon law in Rome, where he became a member of the Anima college. In 1883 he received his doctorate in theology in Würzburg and in Rome in 1884 as a doctor of canon law (Dr. iur. Can.) . In the same year he joined the Hildesheim Vicariate General and rose to become Vicar General in 1905 .

After he had been cathedral capitular since 1894 , he was elected Bishop of Hildesheim on April 26, 1906. He was ordained bishop on August 15 of the same year by the Prince-Bishop of Breslau, Georg Cardinal von Kopp ; Co- consecrators were Hubertus Voss , Bishop of Osnabrück , and Wilhelm Schneider , Bishop of Paderborn . After the death of Cardinal von Kopp, Adolf Bertram was elected Prince-Bishop of the large diocese (since 1930 Archdiocese) of Breslau on May 25, 1914 , which was reduced in size as early as 1922 by the annexation of East Upper Silesia to the resurrected Poland and the establishment of the diocese of Katowice . In the run-up to the referendum in Upper Silesia in 1920, Bertram forbade his clergy to engage in political agitation, making himself unpopular with Polish nationalists, including the Polish Salesian provincial and later Polish primate August Hlond . On the other hand, because of the defense of the claim of the Polish-speaking diocesans to sermons in their native language in church services, confession and lessons, he was later attacked by the National Socialists .

Due to the difficult political conditions in the First World War , Pope Benedict XV led him . 1916 initially as cardinal in pectore and announced the appointment only after the end of the war on December 5, 1919, where he accepted him on the same day as cardinal priest with the titular church of Sant'Agnese fuori le mura in the cardinals college. During this time the priest Johannes Pinsk was Bertram's secret secretary.

From 1919 until his death, Bertram held an important position in church politics as chairman of the Fulda Bishops' Conference .

Bertram's place of death Johannesberg Castle (Jánský Vrch) .
Cardinal Bertram was buried in this double grave in Jauernig in mid-July 1945 during the turmoil of the Odsun in Czechoslovakia next to Prince Bishop Joseph Christian Franz zu Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Bartenstein († 1817).
Cardinal Bertram's grave slab in the bishop's crypt of Wroclaw Cathedral

At the end of the war in 1945 he fled from the Red Army to Jauernig in the Czechoslovakian part of the diocese of that time, where he died and was buried shortly afterwards in his summer residence in Johannesberg. In 1991 his bones were buried in the Wroclaw Cathedral .

Behavior in the Nazi era

To this day, Bertram's behavior towards his Polish diocesans is controversial, especially during the Second World War , as well as his generally soothing tactics towards National Socialism . The cardinal avoided anything that could have led to an open rift between church and state. Bertram did not support a requested intervention against the planned boycott of Jewish businesses in 1933, for which he gave the following reasons:

“My concerns relate
1. to the fact that it is an economic struggle in a group of interested parties who are not close to us in church matters;
2. that the step appears as interference in a matter which affects the area of ​​responsibility of the episcopate less, but the episcopate has good reason to limit itself to its own area of ​​work [...]
4. [in addition] the tactical consideration that this Step, which cannot remain confidential in a narrow circle, would surely find the worst interpretation in the broadest circles of all of Germany, which can by no means be indifferent in the extremely difficult and dark overall situation.
That the press, which is predominantly in Jewish hands, has consistently observed silence in relation to the persecution of Catholics in various countries is only incidentally touched. "

When Jews baptized under the Nuremberg Laws were not allowed to marry “ German-blooded ” partners, church weddings of such couples were no longer allowed. The bishop limited himself to a secret intervention against these laws, which should not be known even within the church.

During the November pogroms in 1938, the National Socialist teachers' association demanded that religious education be discontinued on the grounds that Jews were glorified there. Bertram protested resolutely to the Minister of Education Bernhard Rust : "Every believing teacher knows that this claim is wrong and that the opposite is right".

In 1940 Bertram condemned the plans and propagation of Aktion Lebensborn , National Socialist vitalism and the artificial insemination of people as "immoral", describing Lebensborn and similar projects of the Nazi government as state-ordered adultery . After the introduction of the mandatory Star of David and the beginning of the deportation of Jews from Germany in 1941, the problem arose for the Catholic Church in Germany of how to behave towards its members of Jewish descent. Bertram issued guidelines on September 17, 1941, according to which no distinction should be made between members of the congregation of “ Aryan ” and “non- Aryan ” (that is, of Jewish) descent. Their “segregation” is to be “avoided as long as possible”; however, the parish priests could recommend them “to attend the early church services if possible”. In the case of disturbances, a declaration should be read out according to which there are no differences in origin and descent in the church. Nevertheless, Bertram considered a separate church visit by the Jewish Christians. In a letter to Cardinal Faulhaber from October 1941, he expressed himself differently again: Now he said that the Church had more pressing concerns than the converted Jews. He did not say anything about the fate of the unconverted. A month later he prevented the publication of a pastoral letter drafted by Bishops Konrad Graf von Preysing , Wilhelm Berning and Conrad Gröber , in which they protested against the restrictions on fundamental rights of the Nazi regime and its anti-church measures. They had excluded the beginning of the Holocaust and the inhumane treatment of Soviet prisoners of war . Bertram refused the publication "in principle and for practical reasons".

In 1943, Bertram made a petition in favor of the Jewish partners in “ mixed marriages ”, who were feared to be deported to the concentration camps . It was kept secret. On behalf of the entire episcopate, he also objected to a planned ordinance on the divorce of "racially mixed marriages", as this represented a violation of the sacraments for him. However, he assured the responsible state authorities that his "ideas do not arise from a lack of love for Germanness, not from a lack of feeling of national dignity, nor from a disdain for the harmful effects of an overgrowth of Jewish influences on German culture and patriotic interests."

Various historians interpreted a handwritten note from Bertram to the effect that at the beginning of May 1945 he had asked the priests of his diocese to hold “a solemn requiem in memory of the Führer”. The American jurist Ronald J. Rychlak, the Pope Pius XII. repeatedly defended against accusations of public silence about the Holocaust, claims that this instruction could have come from someone else and that Bertram may have canceled it. According to the Görlitz diocese archivist Winfried Töpler , the “Requiems slip” must have been written before Bertram left Breslau on January 22, 1945, and never left Bertram's desk. He suspects that Bertram wrote it between the detonation of the bomb in the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944 at 12:42 p.m. and the public announcement of Hitler's survival at 6:28 p.m. Then it was made invalid by a thick red line.

The fact that Bertram could claim after the end of the war in 1945 that he knew nothing about the Holocaust is explained by some historians by saying that he kept this knowledge away from himself (or, as the Israeli historian Saul Friedländer says, Bertram simply “lied” for what however he owed the receipt). Bertram had refused to listen to reports "about the situation of the Jews" from the well-informed colleague, Bishop Preysing's Margarete Sommer , and instead insisted on receiving them in writing and certified by Preysing "to guarantee its authenticity".

Fonts

  • History of the Diocese of Hildesheim . 3 volumes. 1899–1925 ( digitized version )
  • Youth soul "precious in God's eyes" . Freiburg 1933.
  • Pastoral letters and pastoral words. Edited by Werner Marschall, Böhlau, Cologne 2000, ISBN 3-412-01399-4 .

literature

Web links

Commons : Adolf Bertram  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thomas Scharf-Wrede: Adolf Bertram: A life in the service of the gospel. In: KirchenZeitung. Issue 27/2020 of July 5, 2020, p. 16.
  2. ^ Josef and Ruth Becker: Hitler's seizure of power. Documents . dtv 2938, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-423-02938-2 (Document No. 148, page 195): Bertram circular on March 31, 1933.
  3. ↑ Saul Friedländer : The Third Reich and the Jews. Volume 1: The Years of Persecution: 1933–1939. Beck, Munich 2006, p. 321.
  4. ^ Battle of Births. In: Time , February 5, 1940 (English).
  5. ↑ Saul Friedländer: The Third Reich and the Jews. Volume 2: The Years of Destruction: 1939–1945. Beck, Munich 2006, p. 327.
  6. ↑ Saul Friedländer: The Third Reich and the Jews. Volume 2: The Years of Destruction: 1939–1945. Beck, Munich 2006, p. 330 f.
  7. ↑ Wolf Gruner: Resistance in Rosenstrasse. fi 16883. Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-596-16883-X , p. 99 f. (to the Rosenstrasse protest ).
  8. ↑ Joachim Köhler: Catholic Church, Catholics and the Jews in the time of National Socialist rule. In: House of History Baden-Württemberg (ed.): Side by side - with each other - against each other? On the coexistence of Jews and Catholics in southern Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries (= Laupheim Talks 2000). Bleicher, Gerlingen 2002, p. 257 f.
  9. ↑ Georg Bönisch, Klaus Wiegrefe : The greater evil. In: Stefan Aust, Gerhard Spörl (ed.): The present of the past. Reinbek 2005 (quotation p. 271); Saul Friedländer: The Third Reich and the Jews. Volume 2: The Years of Destruction: 1939–1945. Beck, Munich 2006, p. 691.
  10. ↑ Ronald J. Rychlak: Goldhagen v. Pius XII. In: First Things. No. 124, June / July 2002, pp. 37–54, online at the Catholic Education Resource Center ( Memento of June 21, 2014 in the Internet Archive ).
  11. ↑ Winfried Töpler: The red line through the note . Lord's Day, July 18, 2019, accessed July 25, 2019.
  12. ↑ a b Saul Friedländer: The Third Reich and the Jews: the years of persecution 1933–1939: the years of extermination 1939–1945 . CH Beck, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-406-56681-3 , p. 897 ( google.at [accessed on February 11, 2020]).
predecessor Office successor
Felix Cardinal von Hartmann Chairman of the Fulda Bishops' Conference
1920–1945 		Joseph Cardinal Frings
Georg Cardinal von Kopp Archbishop of Breslau
1914–1945 		Bolesław Cardinal Kominek
as the next diocesan bishop
Ferdinand Piontek
as capitular vicar
Daniel Wilhelm Sommerwerck Bishop of Hildesheim
1906–1914 		Joseph Ernst
personal data
SURNAME Bertram, Adolf
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bertram, Adolf Cardinal (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Roman Catholic clergyman, bishop of Hildesheim (1906–1914) and Breslau (1914–1945) and cardinal
DATE OF BIRTH March 14, 1859
PLACE OF BIRTH Hildesheim
DATE OF DEATH July 6, 1945
Place of death Johannesberg Castle near Jauernig