Bernhard Karnatz

Bernhard Karnatz 1965

Bernhard Karnatz (born March 29, 1882 in Verden (Aller) ; † March 18, 1976 in Berlin ) was a German lawyer who held leading positions as a secret senior consistorial councilor in the Evangelical Church in Germany.

Life

After studying law in 1909, Karnatz became an "unskilled worker" in the Evangelical Upper Church Council of the Old Prussian Regional Church (EOK). Later he worked in the provincial consistory in Königsberg, Breslau and Posen. From 1916 to 1918 he was an assistant in the War Ministry. In 1919 he returned to the EOK as a secret consistorial councilor. In this function he was in 1919 managing director of the working committee for the implementation of the resolutions of the pre-conference for the German Evangelical Church Conference in Kassel.

In 1925, Karnatz was promoted to senior consistory; In 1929 he was given the position of legal conductor. He was instrumental in the constitution of the Church of the Old Prussian Union , which was passed in 1922 , as well as in the 1931 State Church Treaty with the Free State of Prussia , which was supposed to reorganize the relationship between the Church and the state. For this he received an honorary theological doctorate in 1926 and an honorary doctorate in law from the University of Berlin in 1931 .

In 1933 the Evangelical Upper Church Council was brought into line by the National Socialists. On the other hand, Karnatz wrote an application to file a complaint with the State Court in Leipzig. Through the intervention of Hindenburg , the lawful order was restored, so that there was no legal action.

After the election victory of the German Christians on July 23, 1933, Karnatz was given a forced leave of absence as senior consistorial councilor. In the following year he was put into early retirement and worked for Vorsorge Lebensversicherung AG until 1952.

After the Second World War he became one of the closest collaborators of the Berlin bishop Otto Dibelius . From 1946 he served as a part-time member of the board and treasurer of the central committee for the internal mission . From 1952 to 1958 he was vice-president of the church chancellery of the Evangelical Church in Germany and head of the Berlin office.

In 1942, Karnatz became chairman of the Jerusalem Society . In this capacity he made several trips to East Jerusalem . In 1970 he resigned from this office.

Karnatz was a member of the Outlaw Society .

Fonts

• together with Eitel-Friedrich von Rabenau : Palestine and Us , Festschrift for the centenary of the Jerusalemsverein, Christian Zeitschriftenverlag, Berlin 1952
• Missionary-diaconal work in the Holy Land. A travel report for the Friends of the Jerusalem Association from June 1952 , EZA 6/1579
• The Prussian-English diocese in Jerusalem. Volume 47 (1972)
• About the resignation of President D. Dr. Hermann Kapler as President of the Evangelical Upper Church Council in Berlin . In: Oskar Söhngen : The first phase of the church struggle: (June 24 to July 2, 1933 inclusive) , 1973.

literature

• Hansjürg Ranke: Man and Epoch. Bernhard Karnatz on his 90th birthday on March 29, 1972. In: Yearbook for Berlin-Brandenburg Church History Vol. 47 (1972), pp. 15-22.
• Jürgen Wehrmann and Annemarie Karnatz: Bernhard Karnatz - A life for the Jerusalem Association . In: Almut Nothnagle, Hans-Jürgen Abromeit, Frank Foerster (eds.): Look, we're going up to Jerusalem. Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, Leipzig 2000, pp. 285–307.
• Hannelore Braun, Gertraud Grünzinger (eds.): Personal Lexicon on German Protestantism 1919-1949 . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 978-3-525-55761-7 , p. 130.

Web links

Commons : Bernhard Karnatz  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Directory of the files in the Evangelical Central Archive in Berlin

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Handbook of the German Protestant Churches 1918 to 1949, organs - offices - associations - people, volume 1: supra-regional institutions, p. 25 (PDF)
2. ↑ ^{a b} Karnatz (521) in: The history of society - Part VII of the lawless society in Berlin