Eduard Clinic

Memorial at the New Catholic Cemetery in Dresden

Edward (Eduard) Clinic (born July 21, 1919 in Werne near Bochum , † August 24, 1942 in Dresden ) was a Polish resistance fighter from the circle of the Salesians of Don Bosco . As part of the Germanization policy of National Socialist Germany in the Polish territories annexed in 1939, he was sentenced to death by the Nazi judiciary along with other young Poles and executed in 1942. He is venerated as a martyr in the Roman Catholic Church .

Life

Eduard Klinik's parents Adalbert (Wojciech) and Anastasia (Anastazja), née Schreiber, lived in the Ruhr area until around 1920 , where his father had worked as a blacksmith in the mining industry. Soon after his birth, the family of four returned to their Polish homeland in Posen , where the parents came from, as the father had decided to become a Polish citizen . Edward had an older sister Maria (* 1917) who later became Ursuline . In Poland the family had one more child. Edward attended the elementary school in Poznan and in 1933 switched to the high school of the Salesians Don Bosco in Auschwitz . In the school year 1938/39 he graduated from the Gotthilf-Berger-Gymnasium in Poznan with a high school diploma. He spent his free time in the oratory of the Salesians Don Bosco in Poznan, a church recreational facility for young people. The German attack on Poland and the incorporation of Posen into the German Empire marked a deep turning point in the life of Edward and his friends, whom he had met in the oratorio. During the occupation he worked in a construction company. The oratory was closed and used by the German military . The friends continued to meet. War experiences and the experiences of the occupation challenged their patriotic spirit of resistance. It is possible that the group had contacts with the Polish student and high school student scene, which agreed to go underground for actions against the Germans, including the so-called "Military Organization of the Western Territories" ( Wojskowa Organizacja Ziem Zachodnich , WOZZ). Eduard Klinik was the first of the group to be arrested at his place of work on September 21, 1940 on charges of planning a coup. Together with his friends Czesław Jóźwiak , Edward Kaźmierski , Franciszek Kęsy and Jarogniew Wojciechowski , he first came to the notorious Fort VII in Poznan and was sent to a prison in Wronki on November 16, 1940 . In April 1941 the group was transferred to Berlin and in May 1942 to Zwickau . There the accused were sentenced to death for preparation for high treason . The criminal senate of the Higher Regional Court in Poznan met on July 31, 1942 in the Zwickau investigation center . Edward and his friends, along with other convicts from the Polish resistance, were accused of being members of the Polish National Party, SN . They are among the victims of the extremely harsh Germanization policy pursued by National Socialist Germany in the so-called Warthegau , which not infrequently also turned against church groups and intellectuals. In the conviction, for which the boys' Catholic convictions were irrelevant, the court retroactively applied the so-called Polish Criminal Law Ordinance of December 4, 1941, which made particularly draconian punishments possible for even the smallest offenses. The imposition of the death penalty was justified with the deterrent effect required after the outbreak of the German-Soviet war . On August 1, 1942, the convicts were brought to Dresden, where the sentence was carried out three weeks later in the place of execution on Münchner Platz . The prison chaplain, Father Franz Bänsch OMI, accompanied the group of convicts, consisting of a total of eight young men, to the scaffold with pastoral care . Two requests for clemency , which Edward's parents made on August 4 and he himself made to the Reich Governor of the Wartheland, Arthur Greiser , on August 18, 1942 , remained unanswered until the execution and were only refused after the execution. Edward Klinik and his companions were buried by a Franciscan priest on August 28, 1942 in a mass grave in the Outer Catholic Cemetery in Dresden .

Commemoration

The place of execution in Dresden became a memorial to the anti-fascist resistance in the GDR . Because of their ecclesiastical background, the names of the five friends from the oratory were not mentioned there. In 1999 the grave was rediscovered in the New Catholic Cemetery, a memorial from the Catholic parish of St. Paulus in Dresden-Plauen reminds of the clinic there today. In the same year he and his friends were beatified by the Polish Pope John Paul II . His feast day is August 24th, the day of his execution, June 12th in the Diary of Don Bosco's Salesians. In Poland he is considered a martyr of the German occupation . Despite his Polish nationality, he is also listed in the German martyrology of the 20th century and registered there for the diocese of Essen , to which his place of birth belongs today. Together with the Polish friar Grzegorz Frąckowiak SVD , who was executed eight months later in the same place in Dresden , the five boys are also grouped together to form the group of six blessed martyrs from Münchner Platz in Dresden , whose joint commemoration will also be celebrated on June 12th. This group of martyrs was consecrated on June 1, 2020 in the diocese of Dresden-Meißen newly established Roman Catholic parish .

literature

• Johannes Wielgoß SDS : Blessed Franciscek Kęsy and Blessed Edward Clinic. In: Helmut Moll (ed.): Witnesses for Christ. The German martyrology of the 20th century. Volume I. 7th, revised and updated edition, Schöningh, Paderborn et al. 2019, ISBN 978-3-506-78012-6 , pp. 221-224.

Web links

• Eduard Klinik in the Ecumenical Lexicon of Saints
• Antonio Borrelli: Beato Edoardo Clinic Martire. Short biography on santiebeati.it (Italian)