Christian children

Christian Kinder (born May 29, 1897 in Plön , † May 30, 1975 in Hamburg ) was a German lawyer and consistorial councilor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Schleswig-Holstein . He was a member of the NSDAP, co-founder of the anti-Semitic institute for the research and elimination of the Jewish influence on the German church life and temporarily Reich leader of the German Christians .

Live and act

Children was a son of Mayor Johannes Kinder and his wife Anna Gude Charlotte Clausen (born December 25, 1861 in Glückstadt; † August 9, 1940 in Plön). He had five sisters and three brothers, including the sculptor Johann Christian (* August 8, 1890, † December 24, 1969).

Kinder studied law and obtained a doctorate in law. In 1925 he became a church lawyer in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Schleswig-Holstein; in 1932 he joined the NSDAP .

Early on, Kinder took the side of the church movement of the German Christians (DC) and was their Reichsleiter between September 1933 and June 1935. The second Reich Conference of the DC in Berlin from September 21 to 23, 1934, at which the senior church councils Birnbaum and Langmann gave the keynote speeches and which ended with the introduction of Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller into his office, also took place at this time.

In 1964, Kinder wrote of his role with the DC:

“After the church elections (sc. Mid-July 1933) I became a member of the DC; I immediately came into closer contact with their management. There were internal disputes about various measures taken by the DC leadership, which reached their climax on the occasion of the infamous Sportpalast rally under the Berlin student councilor Krause in September 1933. The Schleswig-Holstein cons. Council Christiansen and I acted sharply as opposition leaders against the violation of all orthodox believers which became evident in this rally. The result was the resignation of Reich Leader Hossenfelder and my election as leader. I accepted the election after my Kiel church authority had expressly approved this and granted me leave for the duration of this activity. From the latter fact it can be seen that I did not think of a longer duration of this assignment from the start. I had become a member of the DC because I was convinced that there was time and opportunity to form a Lutheran Reich Church. I was also convinced that the new state could only endure if the gospel was in force everywhere. ... Those were the reasons that led me to take over the management of DC in December 1933. If I gave up management again in June 1935, the main reason for this was that all my efforts to bring about peace within the Church, despite the most extensive offers, did not achieve the goal. The church dispute had to call the anti-church circles into the scene. In view of the irreconcilability of the BK , for the sake of the church I finally saw only one option to raise the DC banner in order to take the church dispute out of the public eye. ... As soon as it became clear that a minister of the church had actually been appointed - it was Reichsminister Kerrl - and especially when it became clear that Minister Kerrl would deprive the Reichsbishop of essential powers and transfer it to a body that would also trust the BK there was new hope for the pacification of the Evangelical Church. (This was the Reich Church Committee that met under General Superintendent Zöllner .) At the same time, however, I believed that I was right to see that the DC as a movement had also done away with many of its tasks. They still had the Christian task in the parish life of the parishes. ... With that I resigned from the management of the DC in June 1935. In most districts , the DC groups disbanded, headed by my movement. Otherwise, the development went other ways. The national church circles in Thuringia tried to play into the succession of the original imperial movement DC. However, what I always tried to avoid, they became heavily dependent on the state, especially the minister of church, and represented theses that affected the beliefs of the church. "

After August Jäger resigned from the office of legal guardian of the German Evangelical Church (DEK) in October 1934 , Kinder von Ludwig Müller was appointed provisional director of the church chancellery in Berlin, but gave up his assignment after just a few weeks due to differences with the Reich Bishop.

On September 6, 1935 , the Basler Zeitung wrote about his resignation from the office of Reich Leader of the German Christians, announced for September 1935:

"The Reichsleiter of the German Christians, Dr. Christian Kinder, will be stepping down from his post later this month in order to devote himself exclusively to his profession as consistorial councilor in Kiel. From Dr. Kinder, who at the time was the successor of the radical and militant Bishop Hossenfelder, it can be said that, regardless of all opposites, he enjoys great respect as a personality, even in broad circles of the confessional church. It was his merit to have steered the German Christians back on a measured course. His previous deputy, a Wuerttemberg student councilor Rehm , could be his successor . "

Since 1936 Kinder (initially provisional in the first two years) was the President of the State Church Office in Kiel.

After the state church committee was dissolved, Kinder was commissioned by the Reich Church Ministry in March 1937 with the preliminary management of church management in Schleswig-Holstein. Towards the end of the year, the church elections were postponed indefinitely, and at the same time, Kinder became the full leader of the Schleswig-Holstein regional church. The church historian Klauspeter Reumann writes:

“The undisguised state church showed itself in the form of the 'one-man church' of a lawyer. With Kinder's unchanged DC position, the consequence was that he officially granted the German Church the status of a 'noteworthy minority' within the regional church and, in 1939, finally led the Schleswig-Holstein Church into the 'National Church Unification of German Christians'. The critical clergy felt this step towards state-set, lay church leadership more drastically than the church leadership dominated by the DC in 1933. When the regional church was rebuilt in 1945, Siemonsen and Halfmann based their determination of illegality not on the 'Brown Synod' of 1933, but on the church leadership state commissioning of the church office president from 1937. "

On April 4, 1939, on behalf of the regional church, children signed the "Godesberg Declaration" of March 26, which stated:

"By the National Socialism fought any political claim to power of the churches and the German people species-appropriate National Socialist ideology makes binding, it performs the work of Martin Luther by the ideological and political side continued and helps us by religiously back to a true understanding of the Christian faith. .. (The NS) is the completion of the work that the German reformer ... began ... The Christian faith is the unbridgeable antithesis to Judaism . "

- Godesberg Declaration 1939

In the same year he became a co-founder of the Institute for Research and Elimination of the Jewish Influence on German Church Life .

On December 17, 1941, as one of seven national church leaders, he signed a declaration calling for the abolition of all fellowship with Jewish Christians in their regional Protestant churches:

“A German Evangelical Church has to maintain and promote the religious life of German national comrades. Racial Jewish Christians have no place and no right in it. "

With a circular dated December 22, 1941, the DEK church chancellery tempered this radical stance a little:

“We ask ... the highest authorities to take suitable precautions to ensure that the baptized non-Aryans stay away from the church life of the German community. The baptized non-Aryans will have to look for ways and means of creating institutions for themselves that can serve their separate worship and pastoral care. ... "

After a critical intervention by Regional Bishop Theophil Wurm on May 20, 1942, the DEK's Spiritual Trust Council specified this stance as follows:

“An exclusion or even an 'expulsion' is not required in the circular. A reference from the Una Sancta (i.e. the believed one holy church) is not in human hands anyway. It is impossible to misunderstand the circular in this direction. But also a departure from the earthly and legally constituted church is not required. All that is said is that the Star Bearers should stay away from the church life of the German community and should find their own church support, which the church chancellery wants to help make possible. ... "

As a result, children found a "special regulation" for the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Schleswig-Holstein, as Pastor Walter Auerbach later confirmed:

“When, under pressure from above, some Protestant regional churches separated the Christians among the Jews, who were obliged to wear a star, from their ecclesiastical community, the Schleswig-Holstein regional church did not want to enact a law or an ordinance in the above sense. At that time, the current President of the Regional Church Office, Dr. Children personally to ask me to take over pastoral care for the named group of people for Schleswig-Holstein. Since I am a full Jew by race, I live in mixed marriage, I complied with the request and welcomed it to have an ecclesiastical office again and thus also to see the acceptance of the salary to which I am entitled by ministerial decree externally justified. "

The later Bishop Wilhelm Halfmann also spoke appreciatively after the war about the special regulations that children had found:

“On the question of the treatment of non-Aryan members of the Protestant Church, you avoided the radical German-Christian solution and made a special regulation for Schleswig-Holstein, which was also approved by the Confessing Church in Schleswig-Holstein. You used your influence in the party and the police to protect clergy of the regional church from stalking. With regard to the question of the oath of the clergy in 1938, after previous negotiations with representatives of the Confessing Church, you found a form of oath that enabled the clergy to take the oath, so that the clergy belonging to the Confessing Church also took the oath. In addition, it may be of value if I express the fact that, in spite of the contradiction in our people, we have always dealt with one another as Christian people and in pleasantly human forms. "

This “ clean bill of health ” is viewed rather critically today.

In 1943, after his discharge from the Wehrmacht , in which he had served from 1939 to 1943, Kinder became a curator of Kiel University . As president of the regional church office, he had already been the permanent representative of the previous incumbent. Herbert Bührke was his successor as president of the regional church office .

Since 1945 Kinder worked as a businessman. In his memoirs, which he published in 1964, he denied that, as the leader of the German Christians, he had ever brought Christianity and the ideology of "National Socialism" together.

Works

• The reasons for the emergence and abolition of serfdom in the former Amte Plön. Plön 1923; zugl. Kiel, Law and Political Science Dissertation 1923
• People before God: My service to the German Protestant Church. Hamburg: Hanseatic Publishing House 1935
• Men of the Nordmark on the Bzura . Berlin: ES Mittler & Sohn 1941
• New contributions to the history of the Protestant Church in Schleswig-Holstein and in the Reich 1924–1945. Flensburg: Karfeld 1964 (1966 ² ; 1968 ³ )

literature

• Otto Dibelius : Open answer. Vice President Dr. Children, Reichsleiter of the German Christians . Berlin, September 24, 1934, in: Junge Kirche 2 (1934) 802-806.
• Walter Birnbaum : Witness to my time. Statements on 1912 to 1972 , Göttingen: Musterschmidt 1973.
• Kurt Meier : Church and Judaism. The attitude of the Protestant Church to the Jewish policy of the Third Reich , Halle (Saale) 1968.
• Klaus Scholder : Prehistory and Time of Illusion, 1918–1934 (The Churches and the Third Reich; Vol. 1). Ullstein, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-612-26730-2 (reprint of the Frankfurt / M. 1977 edition).
• Gertraud Grünzinger, Carsten Nicolaisen : 1937–1939; From Hitler's election decree to the formation of the clerical trust council (documents on church policy of the Third Reich; vol. 4). Verlag Kaiser, Gütersloh 2000, ISBN 3-579-01866-3 .
• Klauspeter Reumann: Church struggle as a struggle for the "middle". The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Schleswig-Holstein , in: Manfred Gailus / Wolfgang Krogel: From the Babylonian captivity of the church in the national. Regional studies on Protestantism, National Socialism and post-war history 1930 to 2000 , Berlin: Wichern 2006, pp. 29–58.
• Stephan Linck: New beginnings? How the Evangelical Church deals with the Nazi past and its relationship to Judaism. The regional churches in North Elbe , Kiel 2013, ISBN 978-3-87503-167-6 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Christian children in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ Friedrich Stender: Children, Johannes . in: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck . Volume 10. Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1994, p. 203.
2. ↑ Walter Birnbaum: Witness of my time. Statements on 1912 to 1972 , Göttingen: Mustermann 1973, p. 183 ff.
3. ^ The event in the Sportpalast with Reinhold Krause took place on November 13, 1933.
4. ↑ Children: New Contributions… , p. 41 f .; 49 f.
5. ↑ Walter Birnbaum: Witness of my time. Statements on 1912 to 1972 , Göttingen: Mustermann 1973, p. 192 f.
6. ↑ Quoted from Kurt Dietrich Schmidt (ed.): The Confessions and Basic Statements on the Church Question. Volume 3: The year 1935 , Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1936, p. 210 f.
7. ↑ Klauspeter Reumann: Church struggle as a struggle for the "middle" ... , p. 45.
8. ^ Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Frankfurt 2003, p. 309; the complete document from Renate Meurer, Reinhard Meurer: Texts of National Socialism. Examples, analyzes, suggestions for work. Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag , Munich 1982, ISBN 3-486-84061-4 , pp. 41-45
9. ↑ Quoted in Meier: Church and Judaism ... , p. 115 f .; see. also: Exhibition Church, Christians, Jews in Northern Elbe 1933–1945
10. ↑ Quoted in Meier: Church and Judentum ... , p. 116 f .; Over two decades later, children made the following critical comment on this process: “… some (sc. regional churches), such as B. Lübeck and Mecklenburg believed that they had to show their solidarity with the state and party by simply excluding the Jewish community members marked with the star from the regional church. They referred to a 'letter from the German Evangelical Church Chancellery dated December 22, 1941', which recommended that the regional churches separate out non-Aryan Christians from the parishes. Not only was that unchristian - it was also completely unchurch from the standpoint of a Lutheran church. Precisely because Luther's church knows no excommunication of parishioners at all ! "(Children: New contributions ... , p. 124 f.)
11. ↑ Quoted in Meier: Church and Judaism ... , p. 119.
12. ↑ Children summarized their income in his decree of February 10, 1942 as follows: "This means that non-Aryans, and in particular those persons to whom the provisions of §§ 1 and 2 of the Police Ordinance on the identification of Jews from 1 September 1941 […] apply, cannot exercise any rights in a corporation under public law. ”(LKAK 22.02, No. 7211, quoted by Linck: Neue Beginnings?… , P. 203, note 640.)
13. ↑ Quoted in Children: New Contributions ... , p. 191.
14. ↑ http://www.geschichte-bk-sh.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Quellen/KInder__Judenfrage.pdf
15. ↑ Kinder writes: “I got the approval of the brother council of the BK after a consultation with Pastor Tramsen or his successor, albeit with the restriction that the brother council attaches importance to the name of the prospective pastor of this new before official approval To get called community circle. I was able to name this pastor, but I had not yet been able to interview him. And that had to happen now. The person who, in my opinion, should start the new ministry was Pastor Auerbach. ... "(Children: New Posts ... , p. 120 ff.)
16. ↑ http://www.geschichte-bk-sh.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Quellen/Kinder__Vereidigung.pdf
17. ↑ Children: New Contributions ... , p. 76 ff.
18. ^ Children: New contributions ... , p. 192.
19. ↑ See Stephan Linck: New beginnings? How the Evangelical Church deals with the Nazi past and its relationship to Judaism. The regional churches in North Elbe , Kiel 2013.
20. ↑ Children: New Contributions ... , p. 128 ff.
21. ↑ Scholder (1977), p. 728.
22. ↑ It is interesting that Heinz Eduard Tödt reports on the same battle under a different heading and under a different understanding: Die Tragödie an der Bzura , in: ders .: Wagnis und Fügung. Beginnings of a theological biography , Münster: LIT 2012, p. 108 ff.