Christian Kappus

Christian Jakob Kappus (born December 21, 1882 in Weisel , † April 4, 1945 in Wiesbaden ) was a German homeland researcher.

Life

Christian Kappus was the eldest son of the farmer Philipp Adolf Kappus and his wife Anna Magdalena geb. Servant. He attended the teachers' college in Usingen , where one of his father's brothers died of tuberculosis in 1880 . After taking the exam, he first worked as a primary school teacher in Burg in what was then the Dill district and then from 1906 to 1910 in Dausenau in what is now the Rhein-Lahn district . In 1910 he moved to Wiesbaden as a secondary school teacher . He went on educational trips to France and England. Since childhood he has been interested in local history, especially around his birthplace, for which he often visited the main state archive in Wiesbaden . He published his findings in the magazine Nassovia, which appeared between 1900 and 1934, among others .

He participated in the First World War as a soldier. In 1917 he married Johanna Munzow from Neuried-Altenheim , with whom he had a son. The marriage ended in divorce in 1926. With his second wife Lilli Metscher from Iserlohn he became the father of a daughter.

Politically, he was German-national . Based on this basic conviction, he signed a protest letter to the occupiers during the French occupation of Wiesbaden between 1918 and 1924. He was then expelled from Wiesbaden and moved to Marburg . There he worked on the German Language Atlas and the Hessen-Nassau Folk Dictionary . After the seizure of power, Kappus became a member of the NSDAP and storm leader of the SA cavalry squadron .

In World War II he was called up again and promoted to major in the Wehrmacht . In 1943 he was discharged from the Wehrmacht for reasons of age. According to the NSDAP district leadership, Kappus was politically unreliable as a member of the Confessing Church .

On the evening of April 4, 1945, some men rang the doorbell at his apartment door in Wiesbaden and asked his daughter to call him. When he had confirmed his identity to them, they shot him. The night curfew imposed by the occupation forces made it difficult for his relatives to get a doctor. Christian Kappus died two days later as a result of the injuries he suffered. There are various suspicions and rumors about the motive of the perpetrators, all of which actually saw revenge murder. These ranged from an act of revenge for the shooting of partisans in Russia to plundering Polish farm workers. Ultimately, the crime was never solved and the perpetrators were not identified.

Honors

On the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the Philipps University of Marburg , he was made an honorary senator on June 25, 1927 for his regional studies and especially for his contributions to the language atlas and the folk dictionary . According to a decision by the university in 2016, no honors will be withdrawn from it. At the same time, it is emphasized that the current committees disapproved of behavior during the Nazi era , although a final assessment was not yet possible based on the state of knowledge at the time.

Afterlife and memory

Christian Kappus was included in the Nassau biography and in 1950 an obituary appeared in the Nassau Annals .

His estate with a volume of two meters of shelves, including a memorial book of the Nassau fallen of the First World War, is mainly in the main state archive in Wiesbaden. Parts of dialect research are in the holdings of the Marburg University Library.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Kappus, Christian Jakob. Hessian biography (as of December 12, 2012). In: Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen (LAGIS). Hessian State Office for Historical Cultural Studies (HLGL), accessed on February 1, 2019 . 
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Christian Jakob Kappus on weiseler-geschichte.de, accessed on February 3, 2019
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Honorary Senators of the Philipps University of Marburg on uni-marburg.de, accessed on February 3, 2019
4. ^ Kappus, Christian (1882–1945) , nachlassdatenbank.de