Alfred Kleindienst

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Alfred Kleindienst (* 4th November July / 16 November  1893 greg. In Lutsk , Russian Empire ; † 23 November 1978 in Augsburg ) was an Evangelical Lutheran clergyman and head of the Lodsch Evangelical Church.

Life

Kleindienst studied theology at Dorpat University from 1912 to 1916 , was ordained vicar in Tsarskoye Selo in 1917 and ordained in Moscow on April 17, 1918 . From 1918 to 1921 he officiated as pastor in Galka on the Volga, then returned to his home parish Lutsk, where he was pastor until October 1938. His activities for the reconstruction after the First World War extended over the entire German-Evangelical ethnic group in Polish-Volhynia . The Protestant theological faculty of the University of Breslau awarded him an honorary doctorate for this in 1936 .

In 1935 Kleindienst founded the working group of German pastors within the Augsburg Church in Poland and took over its chairmanship. The focus of the group was the Łódź Conference, which particularly opposed the polonization efforts of the Polish state and the Polish regional bishop Juliusz Bursche . In 1936, President Ignacy Mościcki issued a new ecclesiastical law for the Evangelical Augsburg Church by decree and without participation of the parishes, which denied equality to the German majority and contained explicitly anti-German provisions. The entire Augsburg church was placed under state supervision. When Kleindienst organized the opposition to the law, Bursche, in conjunction with the voivodship officials, had his Polish citizenship revoked because of a “formal error”. In February 1939 he had to leave Lutsk. He settled in Warsaw and, as a "non-Polish citizen", was removed from the list of pastors of the Augsburg Church.

When, after the invasion of the German troops and the occupation of Poland in September 1939, an independent Łódź (Litzmannstädter) Evangelical Church with its own consistory was established, the external church office commissioned Kleindienst to manage it. Nevertheless, he turned out to be an opponent of National Socialism, turned against the anti-church attacks by Gauleiter Arthur Greiser and his representatives and stood up for Juliusz Bursche and the Polish pastors who had been sent to concentration camps. After the war, following a denunciation by five Polish pastors who claimed that they had been interned in a concentration camp for him, he was arrested by the American authorities and extradited to Poland. Interventions by Regional Bishop Theophil Wurm , the Archbishop of Canterbury and others were initially unsuccessful. It was not until May 21, 1948, that Kleindienst was acquitted of the accusations by the District Court in Łódź. He went to Bavaria and worked as a pastor in Augsburg from 1949 to 1959. The Bavarian consistory awarded him the title of church council . In 1959 he retired. He died in November 1978 in Augsburg and was buried in the Protestant cemetery there.

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personal data
SURNAME Kleindienst, Alfred
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Evangelical Lutheran clergyman and head of the Lodsch (Litzmannstädter) Evangelical Church
DATE OF BIRTH November 16, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Lutsk
DATE OF DEATH November 23, 1978
Place of death augsburg