Conrad Groeber

Conrad Gröber (born April 1, 1872 in Meßkirch ; † February 14, 1948 in Freiburg im Breisgau ) was Bishop of Meissen and later Archbishop of Freiburg .

Life

Youth and education

Gröber was the son of master carpenter Alois Gröber and his wife Martina and was born in the house on Hauptstrasse, which today belongs to the Wolpert flower shop. He was baptized on April 7th, as was common practice at the time . He grew up under the care of his parents during the Kulturkampf . Later he wrote in his memoirs about this time that the Roman Catholic students were insulted by the Old Catholic teachers as "Roman sick people" and that older students dipped them into the fountain in Messkircher Schlossstrasse.

Later he first attended grammar school in Donaueschingen , then the Heinrich Suso grammar school in Konstanz , where he was an alumnus of the reopened Konradihaus. As a high school student he had already decided on a spiritual career. Since the winter semester of 1891/92 he studied philosophy and theology at the University of Freiburg . In 1893 he became a student at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. In 1898 he was awarded a Dr. theol. PhD .

On August 15, 1897 he was ordained a deacon ; on October 28, 1897 he was ordained a priest . After a short activity as vicar in Ettenheim , he was chaplain for two years at St. Stephen's Church in Karlsruhe , where he got to know the specific problems of city pastoral care.

Teacher and pastor in Constance

Between 1899 and 1902 he was the rector of the Konstanzer Knabenkonvikt " Konradihaus ". There he met the students Max Josef Metzger , a priest who was murdered by the National Socialists in 1944 , and Martin Heidegger , whom he actually set on the philosophical path and with whom he was in tension for life. In 1905 he took over the Trinity Parish in Constance, and in 1922 he became minister pastor in Constance.

Gröber was particularly active as a journalist and scientist in the Constance years. Under his direction the Trinity Church and later the Konstanz Minster were completely restored. He was not only involved in the church-bound association work, but was also involved in the negotiations on the Weimar school compromise as a member of the Center Party and as a city councilor in the Konstanz municipal council. Through his diverse initiatives, the 800th anniversary celebration of the canonization of Bishop Konrad von Konstanz in 1923 and his participation in the diocesan synod in 1921, he became known nationwide.

His inner church career was continued with his appointment as papal secret chamberlain in 1923 and his election to the cathedral chapter of Freiburg in 1925 . In the church administration he was given the department for liturgy and church music , where he introduced a new diocesan hymn in 1929, which received a great response. During this time Gröber also began to work as a preacher in the new medium of broadcasting. At the Freiburg Catholic Day in 1929 he met Nuncio Eugenio Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII ), for whom he played a key role in the negotiations on the Reich Concordat.

Bishop of Meissen and Archbishop of Freiburg

1931 Gröber was from Pope Pius XI. appointed Bishop of Meissen . He was ordained bishop on January 13, 1931, by the Archbishop of Freiburg, Carl Fritz . As early as 1932 he was appointed Archbishop of Freiburg. In 1932 he was made an honorary citizen of the cities of Konstanz and Meßkirch.

Gröber remains controversial to this day because of his stance during the Nazi era . In the first two years after Hitler came to power in particular , he hoped that the Church could come to terms with the National Socialists and that it would be better to meet them than to resist. Hitler accommodated such hopes for tactical reasons. In a call for elections and a referendum on Germany's withdrawal from the League of Nations on November 8, 1933, Gröber wrote that it was a fatherland duty to demonstrate unanimity with the other national comrades. His cooperation policy in the first few years earned Gröber popularly the nickname “brown Conrad”.

For example, he sent a telegram of congratulations to the National Socialist politician Robert Wagner, who was appointed Reich Governor in Baden in the course of bringing the federal states into line : "In the enormous task that is your responsibility, I stand wholeheartedly on your side as the shepherd of the Baden Catholics". At the diocesan synod in Freiburg from April 25 to 28, 1933, he instructed the diocesan clergy: "No provocation and no useless martyrdom ".

The negotiations for the conclusion of the Reich Concordat, from which even the German Bishops' Conference was kept out until shortly before the conclusion, had been eagerly promoted by Gröber - informed in advance of his friend, the chairman of the Center Party Prelate Ludwig Kaas - and thus isolated himself from his fellow bishops.

On June 3, 1933, a joint pastoral word was published by the German Bishops' Conference, the draft of which the Bishops had given Gröber. There one could read that if the state only respected certain rights and demands of the church, the church would gratefully and joyfully support what has become new.

In August 1933, the Archdiocese of Freiburg, under Gröber's responsibility, published an order from the Baden Ministry of Culture and Education in its official gazette about the " German greeting " in religious instruction and officially sanctioned this behavior, which led to considerable annoyance among members of the diocesan.

On October 10, 1933, at a major Catholic event in Karlsruhe, Gröber expressly thanked the “men of the government” for their appearance: “I'm not giving away a secret when I declare that the church government in Freiburg has had dealings with the government over the past few months in Karlsruhe in the most amicable form. I also believe that I am not revealing a secret to them or to the German people when I say that I fully support the new government and the new Reich ”.

The Baden Minister of the Interior, Karl Pflaumer, honored the cooperation promised by Gröber and on November 13, 1933, directed the decree to the police headquarters, “Compulsory measures against Catholic. Clergy outside the framework of the general laws will in future not be permitted ”, which indirectly also allows the conclusion that the Nazi state basically did not feel bound by laws.

At the end of 1933, in a letter to Cardinal Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli , Gröber complained about priests who were critical of the regime and who had been taken into protective custody, that unfortunately it was not always possible to achieve that prudent restraint and expedient consideration among the clergy that the individual clergymen, while fully respecting the principles protects against inconvenience.

In March 1934 he demands that "negotiations should be started as soon as possible, with the aim of classifying the Catholic youth in the Hitler Youth ."

During this time he also decided to become a supporting member of the SS together with several canons . After he had not complied with the request to leave the SS with honor in 1937, Heinrich Himmler deleted him from the list of members the following year. After the war, Gröber declared his entry into the SS by saying that at that time in Freiburg the SS was considered the most decent organization of the party.

On Good Friday in 1941, he gave a sermon, the vocabulary of which came very close to the anti-Semitic vocabulary of the Nazi rulers:

“The driving force behind Jewish legal power was the repulsive hypocrisy and malicious treachery of the Pharisees . They turned out to be more and more of Christ's arch and mortal enemies, [...] their eyes were blindfolded by their prejudice and blinded by their Jewish greed for world domination . To the people , d. H. the fickle crowd of Jews , says the Archbishop: The Pharisee secret service had awakened the animal in him through lies and slander, and they were yearning for gruesome thrills and blood . - To Judas : This unspeakable wight [...] sits hypocritically at the Lord's Supper [...], whereupon Satan drove into him [...] and placed him at the head of the Judas servants who were available. […] Judas haggled with the high priests in a genuinely Jewish way. [...] He (Christ) is betrayed with the sign of exuberant love, with a smacking kiss on the dirty Judas lips . - Finally, to the ' Ecce Homo ' scene: all the compassion of the Jews is smothered in barbaric rawness. The beast has smelled human blood and wants to quench its burning thirst with it. […] Meanwhile, the insane but fortune-telling self-curse of the Jews rings out over Jerusalem. 'His blood come on us and our children!' The curse has been terribly fulfilled. Except for the current day [...] "

In his handbook, which was intended as a spiritual guide for priests, he wrote about the anti-Semite Paul de Lagarde in 1937 :

“He rejected Hegel's doctrine of the state as 'the present God on earth'. His love of fatherland made him a champion of the greater German idea. His plan was to stop German emigration to America and to settle the German abundance in the Polish, Slovak, Bohemian, Galician and Hungarian areas of the Austrian monarchy in order to completely Germanize Austria. Out of patriotism, he called for a fight against liberalism and all party politics. His political ideal was a monarchy supported by a spiritually and morally high aristocracy. His love of the country also caused him to fundamentally dislike Judaism . He saw in the Jewish press and in the international organizations of Judaism a dangerous power striving for world domination . The German people must develop their ancestral style more and more and thereby overcome the spiritual influence of Judaism. His love of fatherland finally made him see a German national church that unites the various denominations as an ideal "

- Gröber : Handbuch, 1937

Regarding National Socialism, Gröber 1937 says:

“National Socialist Germany particularly emphasizes the legal protection of common goods such as blood and soil , family, state and national community, social earth. Particularly decisive for the new administration of justice is the old Germanic legal principle, `` common good over self-interest '', which was included in the party program. The sentence 'what is right is what benefits the people' receives its well-founded meaning through the inclusion of the people in God's eternal plan of creation. The depth of national experience, the will from the primordial reasons of national existence, or the natural feeling of the people are undoubtedly fundamental and decisive factors in law-making and finding of law, as long as they correspond to the natural, God-given order of things. With the Christian meaning and limits of the earth, therefore, should be misunderstood in any way that this new ethos has contributed significantly to the already history has become fact, with the leader of the Third Reich the German people from its outer humiliation and its by Marxism -inflicted awakened inner powerlessness and led to the traditional Germanic values ​​of honor, loyalty and bravery "

- Gröber : Handbuch, 1937

However, even in the early days of the “ Third Reich ”, more critical statements by Gröber can be found. In contrast to the majority of German bishops, he advocated a public protest by the Catholic Church against the call for a boycott of Jews on April 1, 1933 (Gröber: "with consideration for the innocent and converts "). In the Lenten pastoral letter of February 10, 1933 Gröber urged the diocese to seek to ensure that the lies and slander, the incitement and hatred, violence and murder not the German name ignominious stain.

Like the entire Catholic Church, Gross was exposed to attacks by those in power. In addition to the prohibition of other parties and the dissolution of many Catholic associations outside the church, those in power also resorted to personal slurs. In 1936 Julius Streicher carried out a speech campaign in Baden, during which he personally attacked the church and also Gröber because of an alleged love affair with a Jewish woman and brought him into connection with the so-called moral trials . The corresponding rumors were also fed by a Catholic clergyman, a member of the NSDAP Heinrich Mohr, who had hopes for the bishop's seat after Gröber was removed.

From 1935 Gröber fought against the Nazi regime, but only within the framework drawn by the laws and in particular the Reich Concordat.

After the beginning of the murder of the mentally ill, known as euthanasia (" Action T4 "), he protested - according to Schwalbach (see bibliography ) - as the first of the German bishops in writing, namely to the Baden Interior Minister Pflaumer.

His New Year's Eve sermons in the Freiburg Cathedral and his Lenten Shepherd's words were particularly effective. In it, he particularly castigated the Nazi regime's hostility to the church, and after Schwalbach in the New Year's Eve sermon in 1941, also euthanasia, which he described as murder . He also held his protective hand over the resistance fighter Gertrud Luckner, who was commissioned by Caritas to support so-called Jewish Christians .

For the Nazi rulers, he was “the worst agitator against the Third Reich”. The Baden Minister of Culture, Paul Schmitthenner, described him in a memo from August 8, 1940 as the “greatest enemy of the NSDAP and the National Socialist state”. Only his office as archbishop has so far saved him from the fact that he is not yet in prison as a traitor .

On the other hand, Gröber is still accused of not providing sufficient support to the suffragan bishop Joannes Baptista Sproll von Rottenburg, who was expelled from his diocese in 1938 . He wrote a letter to the President of the People's Court, Roland Freisler , who condemned the priest Max Josef Metzger , who belonged to his diocese, to death:

“Honored Mr. President of the People's Court!

I have just received news of the trial that led to the death sentence of my diocesan priest Dr. Max Metzger led. I deeply regret the crime of which he is guilty. If I send him to my lawyer, Dr. Dix described directed letters as an idealist, so it happened without my having any knowledge of what he had done criminally. It is important to me to inform you of this, because it is completely far from me to include your deed in the area of ​​idealism as I have described it. "

While part of the literature evaluates this letter as a last resort used for tactical considerations, namely to achieve the conversion of the death penalty to imprisonment, another part of the literature evaluates it as a cowardly distancing from someone sentenced to death for vain reasons. However, other documents from those days show that Gröber did indeed intend to have the sentence commuted. It is clear from them that Gröber believed that he only had a minimal chance of success with Freisler by recognizing the grounds for conviction.

On November 12th, Gröber informed his diocesan clergy about the conviction of Metzger. a. in the following words: “This extremely sad case is intended to teach us urgently that we embarrassingly refrain from anything and everything that could harm the fatherland in its difficult time and thus also ourselves, grateful and grateful for the enormous sacrifices and successes of our soldiers in the field to intercede, to strengthen the courage of our believers in their homeland [...], to think of the terrible misfortune of a lost war with Bolshevik consequences and to pray to God every day [...] that he protect our homeland and with an honorable inner and outer peace bless. ".

In a pastoral word on May 8, 1945 (the day of the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht ), he declared that one should not succumb to extreme anti-Semitism. In his view, the Holocaust was wrong because it pushed the Jews into a defensive position from which they became "even more dangerous to the state than the largest enemy army".

After the end of the war

Immediately after the end of the war, Gröber was highly regarded for his speeches against the regime. Called in as advisor and arbitrator, he opposed the restoration of the Center Party and advocated the gathering of all Christian forces in what would become the CDU .

However, the bitter disputes from the time of National Socialism remained: An event initiated by Pastor Wilhelm Köhler and Richard Schneider , who was the first diocese to be brought to the Dachau concentration camp in 1940 , Gröber tried to keep silent, although five of the sixteen were in clergy from his diocese who had been arrested at the concentration camp were murdered there. Like the priests from the diocese of Münster , who had been honored in a particularly solemn manner in a pontifical office of the Münster bishop, the concentration camp priests wanted to commemorate their dead confreres and have an impact on the public by confessing that they should not have died in vain. The concentration camp priests expressed the accusations made to them in a resolution: “[…] We regret when we still have to hear from the clergy that we have to attribute it to our own imprudence that we were the victims of the Gestapo . [...] we can't help the impression that the less he came into contact with the Secret State Police, the more a priest the church authorities preferred. "

He was the main point of contact for the French occupying forces. Thanks to his connections, the picture of the three kings of the master von Meßkirch , stolen from the Martinskirche in Meßkirch and brought to Alsace as spoils of war, was brought back.

Conrad Gröber died only about four months after his golden jubilee as a priest.

Views on the controversial cleric

Gröber is still controversial today. Because of his attempts to come to terms politically, including the fact that he became a supporting member of the SS, some people call him "the brown Conrad". On the other hand, in contrast to many fellow bishops, he protested against the boycott of the Jews and against the murder of the mentally ill and protected the resistance fighter Gertrud Luckner , who was entrusted with the support of so-called Jewish Christians , and whom he gave unreserved and generous financial support, as she campaigned for Jews and Christians of Jewish origin at the time.

When he was appointed Archbishop of Freiburg in 1932, Gröber became an honorary citizen of the cities of Constance and Messkirch. He was also appointed papal assistant to the throne, Comes Romanus and knight of the sovereign Order of Malta. In 1947 he was granted honorary citizenship of the city of Freiburg im Breisgau “in recognition of his services to the city as a warning and comforter in the most difficult times”.

In July 1961, a memorial plaque was unveiled in memory of Conrad Gröber at the house where he was born in Hauptstrasse in Messkirch. On the occasion of the 700th anniversary of his hometown, a relief was inaugurated in his honor on July 22nd, 1961. This was donated by the Catholic parish and is located on the outer wall of the Johann Nepomuk Chapel at St. Martin's Church. On this occasion, the religious philosopher Bernhard Welte from Messkirchen , who had been his private secretary until Grober's death, gave the celebratory speech.

At the end of the 1970s, the “Conrad-Gröber-Haus”, a Caritas nursing home for the elderly, was inaugurated in the former hospital building in Meßkirch.

Streets in Meßkirch, Constance and Freiburg bear Grober's name.

In a symbolic act, the Konstanz municipal council withdrew Gröber's honorary citizenship on September 26, 2019, because his supporting membership in the SS and his widely documented anti-Judaism had meanwhile been proven by contemporary history research.

Fonts

• History of the Jesuit college and grammar school in Konstanz , 1904
• The Old Catholicism in Messkirch , 1912
• The Constance Minster . Its history and description , 1914
• The mother. Paths, sources of strength and goals of Christian motherhood , 1922
• Reichenau Art , 1924
• Heinrich Ignaz Freiherr von Wessenberg . In: Freiburg Diocesan Archive, 55, 1927 and 56, 1928
• Christ Pastor. Portraits of the Good Shepherd , 1931
• Church and Artists , 1932
• National church? An enlightening word to preserve denominational peace , Herder, Freiburg 1934
• Church, country and love of the country. Contemporary considerations and replies , Herder, Freiburg 1935
• Handbook of contemporary religious questions , Herder, Freiburg 1937
• The Reichenau . 1938
• The mystic Heinrich Seuse . The story of his life. The origin and authenticity of his works , 1941
• The suffering of our Lord Jesus Christ in the light of the four holy Gospels and recent history , 1946
• From my Roman diary , 1947

literature

• Friedrich Wilhelm Bautz :  Gröber, Conrad. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 2, Bautz, Hamm 1990, ISBN 3-88309-032-8 , Sp. 353-354.
• E. Keller: Conrad Gröber 1872–1948. Archbishop in difficult times . 1982
• Wolfgang Müller:  Gröber, Konrad. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 7, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1966, ISBN 3-428-00188-5 , p. 109 ( digitized version ).
• Hugo Ott : Conrad Gröber (1872–1948). In: Jürgen Aretz , Rudolf Morsey , Anton Rauscher (Eds.): Contemporary history in life pictures. From the German Catholicism of the 19th and 20th centuries. Volume 6. Matthias Grünewald Verlag, Mainz 1984, ISBN 3-7867-1140-2 .
• Hugo Ott: Possibilities and forms of ecclesiastical resistance against the Third Reich on the part of the church authorities and the parish clergy, illustrated using the example of the Archdiocese of Freiburg im Breisgau . In: Historisches Jahrbuch , 92, 1972, p. 312 ISSN  0018-2621 .
• Christoph Schmider: The Freiburg bishops: 175 years of the Archdiocese of Freiburg. A story in pictures of life . Herder Verlag, Freiburg i. Br. 2002. ISBN 3-451-27847-2 .
• Klaus Scholder: The churches and the Third Reich . Volume 1. Propylaea, Frankfurt am Main a. a. 1977 ISBN 3-550-07339-9 (new edition: Econ, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-612-26730-2 ).
• Klaus Scholder: The churches and the Third Reich . Volume 2. 1985 ISBN 3-548-33091-6
• Bruno Schwalbach: Archbishop Conrad Gröber and the National Socialist dictatorship . Karlsruhe 1985, ISBN 3-7617-0234-5 (scientific monograph with many original citations).
• Bruno Schwalbach: Archbishop Conrad Gröber and the German catastrophe. His struggle for a human reorganization . Karlsruhe 1994, ISBN 978-3-7617-0308-3
• Roland Weis: The real Grosser . In: Meßkircher Heimathefte . Issue 4th year 1998
• Johannes Werner: But his heart stayed at the lake. Konrad Gröber on Konstanz , in: Writings of the Association for the History of Lake Constance and its Surroundings , 131, 2013, pp. 199–207
• Wolfgang Proske: Dr. Conrad Gröber: 'Honestly German' and 'hand over registers' in the organ work of his soul ... , in: Wolfgang Proske (Ed.): Täter - Helfer - Free riders. Nazi victims from southern Baden (=  perpetrators - helpers - free riders . Band 6 ). 1st edition. Kugelberg, Gerstetten 2017, ISBN 978-3-945893-06-7 , pp. 104 ff .

Remarks

1. ↑ Other teachers were no longer allowed to teach.

Web links

Commons : Conrad Gröber  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Conrad Gröber in the catalog of the German National Library
• Entry on Conrad Gröber on catholic-hierarchy.org ; accessed on November 16, 2016.
• Thomas Breuer: The attitude of the Catholic Church to the persecution of the Jews in the Third Reich. In: zum.de. May 22, 2003 . 
• Christoph Schmider among others: Archbishop Conrad Gröber. Archdiocese of Freiburg 

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Ursula Mallkowsky: City commemorates Conrad Gröber. In: Südkurier , February 9, 2008.
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Werner Fischer: Controversial church man. In: Südkurier , June 18, 2011.
3. ↑ ^{a b} Michael Rudloff: The history of the church revision. (3.2 MB) Freiburg, January 2002, p. 24 , accessed on March 6, 2020 . 
4. ^ Archbishop Gröber is committed to Hitler. In: Freiburg newspaper . October 10, 1933, p. 2 , accessed March 6, 2020 . 
5. ^ Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 201.
6. ↑ Proof from Breuer
7. ↑ Sandra Häusler: Stories from Unusual People. In: Südkurier , June 16, 2011.
8. ↑ ^{a b} Manfred Dieterle-Jöchle (dim): Memory of Archbishop. In: Südkurier , January 23, 2008
9. ^ Honorary citizen of the city of Freiburg. In: freiburg.de. March 6, 2019, accessed March 6, 2020 . 
10. ↑ ^{a b} Once upon a time . In: Südkurier , July 27, 2011.
11. ^ Karlheinz Kirchmaier: Honorary Citizen. World bones return home to Messkirch . In: Schwäbische Zeitung , November 28, 2008.
12. ↑ Gregor Moser: Two home-bound Messkirchers . In: Südkurier , June 18, 2011.
13. ^ Current local council. In: konstanz.de. September 27, 2019, accessed March 6, 2020 . Stefan Fuchs: Nazi past: Konstanz municipal council recognizes honorary citizenship. In: schwaebische.de. October 2, 2019, accessed March 6, 2020 . Ex-Freiburg Archbishop: Freedom of honor gone, street is renamed. In: kathisch.de . March 5, 2020, accessed March 6, 2020 . 
     
     
14. ↑ see above for quotations from it. Klaus-Hermann Rößler attempts to evaluate: Archbishop Conrad Gröber and the “Handbook of Contemporary Religious Questions” from 1937. A document of adaptation or resistance? Hochschulschrift, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg , Zula, 1983. Available in institutes of this university as well as at the University of Konstanz , according to: Südwestdeutscher Bibliotheksverbund , SWB. Gröber's book, published in south-west Germany, is kept at the DNB , according to the library's responsibility (before 1945, German literature translated from German, etc.) only in the Reich German, then former GDR department, now the Leipzig location of the DNB.

predecessor	Office	successor
Carl Fritz	Archbishop of Freiburg 1932–1948	Wendelin Rauch
Christian Schreiber	Bishop of Meissen 1931–1932	Petrus Legge

This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on October 1, 2005 .