Bernhard Strasser

Bernhard Strasser OSB , baptized Paul (born March 21, 1895 in Windsheim , † May 11, 1981 in Norfolk , Madison County , Nebraska , United States ), was a German Benedictine monk and publicist .

Life

Paul Strasser at the age of two with his older brother Gregor (1897)

Paul Strasser was the second of five children of the Bavarian civil servant Peter Strasser and his wife Pauline. His siblings included the politicians Gregor Strasser (1892–1934) and Otto Strasser (1897–1974). After attending school, Paul Strasser took part in the First World War from 1915 to 1918 .

After returning home from the war, Strasser joined the Bavarian Benedictine monastery in Metten in 1919 or 1920 and took the religious name Bernhard. In the following years he studied theology at the universities of Munich and Würzburg . After he was ordained a priest in 1923, from 1924 he was employed as a pastor in the parishes looked after by the monastery and as a prefect in the boarding school of the monastery.

In the political activities of his brothers Gregor and Otto, who were among the leading figures of the NSDAP until the early 1930s, Bernhard Strasser only had a marginal part and mostly only as an observer. As a contemporary witness, however, he later provided a lot of information and assessments about possible hidden views, actions and political aspirations of his brothers. His memories - which were heavily colored and used too uncritically in the past - are therefore used by historians to research the early history of the NSDAP.

While Strasser's older brother Gregor was shot by SS men in the early summer of 1934 as part of the Röhm affair and his younger brother Otto emigrated in May 1933 as the leader of the “ Black Front ” banned by the Nazi authorities , Strasser himself fled from Germany in July 1935. Previously there had been evidence that the Gestapo were interested in him, although it remained unclear whether he had been targeted by the secret police due to his relatives to Gregor and Otto Strasser or had received negative attention due to his activity as a priest. There are suspicions that the National Socialist Aufhauser mayor Franz Xaver Froschhammer, known as anti-clerical , was involved in denunciations against Strasser. After brief stays in Austria, Switzerland and France, Strasser first lived in a Benedictine abbey in Luxembourg. When the Second World War broke out, he went to France. After the German occupation of France, Strasser fled to Portugal - after being briefly arrested in Le Havre as an alleged German spy. There he helped his brother Otto, who was also in hiding in the country, to hide in a monastery. Bernhard Strasser moved from Portugal to the United States of America in the fall of 1940.

Bernhard Strasser was classified as an important target by the National Socialist police at the end of the 1930s: in the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin, which mistakenly suspected him to be in Great Britain, placed him on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people who had to be found in the event of a successful invasion and Occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht should be identified and arrested by subsequent SS special commands with special priority.

In the USA, Strasser worked as a teacher in the Benedictine monastery of St. John in Collegeville in the US state of Minnesota until 1950 . He then worked as a pastor in Primrose (1950–1963) and St. Henry's Church , Howell ( Nebraska ) (1963–1968). From 1968 until his death he was the chaplain at St. Joseph's Nursing Home in Norfolk, Nebraska.

In the early post-war period, Bernhard Strasser participated from the United States in the unsuccessful attempts by his brother Otto to set up a Catholic people 's party in West Germany . In Germany, Strasser published a memory book about his brothers. He also corresponded with prominent figures in contemporary history such as Heinrich Brüning and historians such as Udo Kissenkoetter .

Fonts

• Confess well! . Metten Abbey 1932
• Gregor and Otto Strasser . Munich 1954. (New edition 1965 as Gregor and Otto Strasser. Brief description of their personality and their will ) ( Digitized of the English manuscript at the Institute for Contemporary History )

literature

• A life in the shadow of kin liability. P. Bernhard Strasser, the brother of Gregor Strasser, 70 years old , in: Straubinger Tagblatt of March 21, 1965
• Michael Kaufmann, Memento mori. In memory of the deceased conventuals of the Benedictine abbey of Metten since the re-establishment in 1830 (= development history of the Benedictine abbey of Metten, Part V), Metten 2008, 434f.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Rudolf Neumaier: Karl Valentins heroic deed. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , April 9, 2013, accessed on May 4, 2017.
2. ^ Entry on Strasser on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .
3. ^ Robert Edgar Cazden: The Free German and Free Austrian Press and Booktrade in the United States , 1965, p. 50.
4. ^ John Hellman: The Communitarian Third Way. Alexandre Marc's Ordre Nouveau, 1930-2000 , 2002, p. 58.