Christa Thomas

Christa Thomas (born June 28, 1893 in Cologne ; † April 2, 1989 ibid.) Was a German youth and social worker as well as a publicist who was involved in the peace and women's movement. In her hometown, the Christa-Thomas-Weg is named after her.

Life

Christa Thomas was born in Cologne in 1893 as the first child of Sophia Wüst and her husband Friedrich Thomas, who worked as a city architect , into a bourgeois Catholic family and grew up with four younger brothers. According to her own statements, because of “disciplinary difficulties” she spent several years at a boarding school run by the “ Sisters of the poor child of Jesus ” in Cologne, where she received a strict Catholic education. At the age of 18 she published her first texts of a religious nature in the Rheinischer Merkur and in the church newspaper for the Archdiocese of Cologne . During the First World War, in which one of her brothers died, she worked in an ammunition factory and under miserable conditions as a houseworker in a Christian hospice. According to her own statements, it was here that she wanted to become a social worker.

After the war she made contact with the Catholic Women's Association and came into contact with its founder Hedwig Dransfeld , who arranged for her a place at the Social Policy Women's School of the Caritas Association in Freiburg . After graduating as a state-recognized welfare worker and pastoral care assistant (with missio canonica ), she became general secretary of the Central Association of Catholic Virgins' Associations in Bochum in 1922 . As a result, she held other positions within church-Catholic institutions, but - according to one account - forfeited her prospects for a career in Catholic associations due to excessive indications of internal church grievances.

In Bamberg, from the end of 1926, she initially worked for around two years as the head of the women's department at the employment office, but then returned to practical social work as a "social worker", among others for Dr. Oetker in Bielefeld. In the early 1930s she published again - biographies, brochures and individual contributions for the Canisiuswerk .

At the beginning of the Nazi era , she was active without pay along with the priest Matthias Becker as a social worker in the Dusseldorf Slum Heinefeld where homeless and impoverished people, including many Sinti had settled on a former military training area "wild". To support her living, she published articles in the Cologne church newspaper in which she reported on the situation in the settlement. Appeals for donations and collections in parishes provided financial support for their work. When she supported protests against a planned eviction and relocation to closer replacement quarters, she was accused of having "incited" the people living there. A brochure she published under the title Die am Rande der Großstadt , in which she denounced the social conditions in the settlement, was confiscated by the Gestapo in 1936 before extradition.

During the Second World War , in which two more of her brothers were killed, she worked in Silesia as a soldier carer and social worker.

In the immediate post-war period she was in Bamberg, where she joined the CSU (later switched to the CDU in NRW) and set up a reading room for refugees for Caritas. Together with Pastor Decker, she later got involved in the founding of the Peace Association of German Catholics in Düsseldorf . Thomas traveled around the country speaking to church congregations and congregations to encourage Catholic women to work. From 1954 to 1972 she published monthly newsletters to the Peace Friends to spread pacifist ideas in Catholic circles. These were dedicated to current affairs, peace work, the Catholic Church and the question of women.

During this time she lived and worked as a home manager in a children's recreation home in Mönchengladbach. In the Friedensbund she campaigned against the rearmament of the Federal Republic of Germany and became a founder and presidential member of the main committee for referendums, which tried to prevent this by activating a broad mass movement. The group was largely occupied by Communists or infiltrated by the SED. After Konrad Adenauer's successful Bundestag election in 1953 , rearmament was initiated in parliament and the counter-movement was fought as anti-constitutional. Christa Thomas was charged in 1954 with “high treason and treason, ringleading in an anti-constitutional organization and dissemination of anti-constitutional writings”, but acquitted in 1955. In the appeal proceedings before the Federal Court of Justice, the judgment was overturned, but the proceedings were then "abandoned" at the Dortmund Regional Court until the 1968 criminal law reform . One of their defenders was Diether Posser , later Finance Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia , who viewed the case as a "sensational success" and an important political criminal case.

Christa Thomas continued to be involved in the peace movement in the following years , she was a member of the German Peace Society and the Action Democratic Progress and ran for the German Peace Union in 1960 and 1963 . In 1977 she was temporarily arrested together with young conscientious objectors during an action against a Bundeswehr exhibition in Cologne-Wahn .

At an advanced age, she, who had often been in the “second row” behind men in her engagement - both in Catholic and left-wing structures - increasingly concerned herself with women's rights and gender inequality. She broke away from the Catholic Church and gave lectures on equality.

After moving into the Riehler Heimstätten as a retirement home in 1975 , she took the initiative to found a women's shelter in Cologne - which was rejected by both the management of the Heimstätten (which would have had an empty building available) and the city administration. After the press had reported on her initiative, she came into contact with the Cologne women's group Women Help Women , with whose commitment the first Cologne women 's refuge , initially financed entirely from private funds, was opened.

Christa Thomas died in April 1989 in Cologne. Its written premature legacy they had from 1969 to a lesser extent to the Evangelical Central Archives issued in Berlin and to a greater extent from 1979 to the Historical Archive of Cologne . After her death it was brought together in the Cologne city archive under the stock number 1276.

In July 2004 the Cologne-Kalk district council decided unanimously to name a road in Cologne-Brück after Christa Thomas (Christa-Thomas-Weg).

Fonts (selection)

Dr. Carl Sonnenschein, the world city alarm clock: The cath. German people (= Small Life Pictures . No. 28 ). Kanisiuswerk, papal printing house, Freiburg im Breisgau 1930.
Margrit Lekeux. A friend of the workers (= Small Life Pictures . No. 40 ). Kanisiuswerk, Papal Printing House, Freiburg im Breisgau 1931.
The life of Hans Wölfel, Bamberg's martyr . Glock and Lutz, Nuremberg, Bamberg, Passau 1947.
We call for a referendum! (Leaflet). Düsseldorf 1951.
Crusade for Peace, ninth year
Victory of the Christian conscience: Excerpts from the protocol from the trial against Christa Thomas before the IV. Criminal Chamber of the Düsseldorf Regional Court . 1955.

Individual evidence

^ ^A ^b Birgit Sack: The female members of the Reich and Landtag of the Center and the Bavarian People's Party (1919–1933) A collective biography . In: Between religious ties and modern society. Catholic women's movement and political culture in the Weimar Republic (1918 / 19–1933) . (Dissertation, Freiburg, 1995) (= International university publications . No. 266 ). Waxmann Verlag, Münster, New York, Munich, Berlin 1998, ISBN 978-3-8309-5593-1 , pp. 97–98 ( digitized version ( individual chapter with different pagination) via kas.de ).

↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h ⁱ ^j ^k Reading room - inventory - Order 1276 - Thomas, Christa. In: historischesarchivkoeln.de. Historical Archive of the City of Cologne, September 1998, accessed on January 31, 2020 .

↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h ⁱ ^j ^k ^l Claudia Pinl: "There were no mass wars at the time of matriarchy ..." The life of the pacifist and feminist Christa Thomas . In: Irene Franken (Hrsg.): Cologne women a city hiking and reading book . Volksblatt-Verlag, Cologne 1992, ISBN 3-923243-94-4 , p. 61-72 .

↑ ^a ^b Peter Steinbach, Johannes Tuchel: Resistance against National Socialism . Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1994, ISBN 978-3-05-002568-1 , pp. 419 .

^ Elisabeth Brändle line: Christa Thomas . In: Die Grünen Baden-Württemberg (Hrsg.): Women for Peace: Documentation . 1st edition. Stuttgart 1983, ISBN 3-9800878-0-8 .

↑ Martin Stankowski: Left Catholicism after 1945: the press of oppositional Catholics in the struggle for a democratic and socialist society (= Young Science Collection ). Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1976, ISBN 3-7609-0247-2 , p. 19 .

↑ Gunther Rojahn: Main Committee for Referendum . In: Elfes - More than a judgment Charge and discharge of a political issue . Dissertation. Berlin 2009, p. 60-69 .

↑ ^a ^b Gerhard Spörl: The climate has changed a lot ... About old Nazis in new ministries, agitation against communists and the role model Gustav Heinemann. A conversation with Diether Posser . In: The time . tape 21 . Hamburg May 20th, 1988: “The situation was grotesque. There was a political criminal division at the Federal Court of Justice; he carried out the so-called model trial against an organization, for example the "Society for German-Soviet Friendship", the "Committee for Referendum against Remilitarization" or the "Committee for Unity and Freedom in German Sport". The Senate declared the organization to be unconstitutional, secretive and a criminal organization. Any member of this association could be punished for membership alone. When the model trial was decided, all other proceedings were handed over to the State Security Penal Chambers, which practically had to adhere to the established case law. If they deviated from it, the public prosecutor made sure that the appeal came to precisely those five judges who had committed themselves in the fundamental process. All of that was abolished in 1968. But it worked for years. "

↑ Diether Posser: Christa Thomas: Punishable Peace Love? In: Lawyer and Politician in the Cold War. On the pan-German misery of the political justice system (= 158ff ). Bertelsmann, 1991.

↑ Minutes of the 51st meeting of the Kalk district council in the 1999/2004 electoral period, on Thursday, July 15, 2004, from 5:00 p.m. to 7:55 p.m. in the conference room of the Kalk town hall, Kalker Hauptstraße 247-273, 51103 Cologne (Kalk). TOP 7.1.1, p. 9 ( digitized via stadt-koeln.de )

personal data
SURNAME	Thomas, Christa
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German social worker, Catholic pacifist and women's rights activist
DATE OF BIRTH	June 28, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH	Cologne
DATE OF DEATH	April 2, 1989
Place of death	Cologne

[:3-1] A ^b Birgit Sack: The female members of the Reich and Landtag of the Center and the Bavarian People's Party (1919–1933) A collective biography . In: Between religious ties and modern society. Catholic women's movement and political culture in the Weimar Republic (1918 / 19–1933) . (Dissertation, Freiburg, 1995) (= International university publications . No. 266 ). Waxmann Verlag, Münster, New York, Munich, Berlin 1998, ISBN 978-3-8309-5593-1 , pp. 97–98 ( digitized version ( individual chapter with different pagination) via kas.de ).

[:0-2] ↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h ⁱ ^j ^k Reading room - inventory - Order 1276 - Thomas, Christa. In: historischesarchivkoeln.de. Historical Archive of the City of Cologne, September 1998, accessed on January 31, 2020 .

[:1-3] ↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h ⁱ ^j ^k ^l Claudia Pinl: "There were no mass wars at the time of matriarchy ..." The life of the pacifist and feminist Christa Thomas . In: Irene Franken (Hrsg.): Cologne women a city hiking and reading book . Volksblatt-Verlag, Cologne 1992, ISBN 3-923243-94-4 , p. 61-72 .

[:2-4] Peter Steinbach, Johannes Tuchel: Resistance against National Socialism . Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1994, ISBN 978-3-05-002568-1 , pp. 419 .

[5] Elisabeth Brändle line: Christa Thomas . In: Die Grünen Baden-Württemberg (Hrsg.): Women for Peace: Documentation . 1st edition. Stuttgart 1983, ISBN 3-9800878-0-8 .

[6] Martin Stankowski: Left Catholicism after 1945: the press of oppositional Catholics in the struggle for a democratic and socialist society (= Young Science Collection ). Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1976, ISBN 3-7609-0247-2 , p. 19 .

[7] Gunther Rojahn: Main Committee for Referendum . In: Elfes - More than a judgment Charge and discharge of a political issue . Dissertation. Berlin 2009, p. 60-69 .

[:4-8] Gerhard Spörl: The climate has changed a lot ... About old Nazis in new ministries, agitation against communists and the role model Gustav Heinemann. A conversation with Diether Posser . In: The time . tape 21 . Hamburg May 20th, 1988: “The situation was grotesque. There was a political criminal division at the Federal Court of Justice; he carried out the so-called model trial against an organization, for example the "Society for German-Soviet Friendship", the "Committee for Referendum against Remilitarization" or the "Committee for Unity and Freedom in German Sport". The Senate declared the organization to be unconstitutional, secretive and a criminal organization. Any member of this association could be punished for membership alone. When the model trial was decided, all other proceedings were handed over to the State Security Penal Chambers, which practically had to adhere to the established case law. If they deviated from it, the public prosecutor made sure that the appeal came to precisely those five judges who had committed themselves in the fundamental process. All of that was abolished in 1968. But it worked for years. "

[9] Diether Posser: Christa Thomas: Punishable Peace Love? In: Lawyer and Politician in the Cold War. On the pan-German misery of the political justice system (= 158ff ). Bertelsmann, 1991.

[10] Minutes of the 51st meeting of the Kalk district council in the 1999/2004 electoral period, on Thursday, July 15, 2004, from 5:00 p.m. to 7:55 p.m. in the conference room of the Kalk town hall, Kalker Hauptstraße 247-273, 51103 Cologne (Kalk). TOP 7.1.1, p. 9 ( digitized via stadt-koeln.de )