Friedrich Müller (resistance fighter)

Hermann Friedrich Wilhelm Müller , also called Fritz Müller-Dahlem (born March 11, 1889 in Berlin ; † September 20, 1942 in the Soviet Union ), was a German Christian resistance fighter against National Socialism , member of the Confessing Church , Protestant pastor and captain of the Wehrmacht .

Life

Müller was the son of high school - Rector Fritz Müller and his wife Marie, born Rondel. At the age of eight he became critically ill. This experience reinforced his resolve to take up the profession of pastor. After attending the Königsstädtisches Gymnasium , he began studying Protestant theology , which was interrupted by the First World War. As an army soldier , he was wounded several times, which posed serious theological and philosophical questions. He completed his studies by attending the preacher's seminary in Naumburg am Queis . He took up his first pastoral position in the Evangelical Church of the Old Prussian Union in Lautawerk in Lusatia , where there was still no church building for the emerging community. From the workers of the local aluminum works he gathered a congregation with whom he succeeded in building a new church in 1927.

In 1928 he was appointed to the Markuskirche in Berlin-Steglitz . Just a few years later, in 1933, he moved to the Protestant church in Berlin-Dahlem , where he worked with Martin Niemöller . Together with another 2,000 evangelical pastors, he protested against the synchronization of the evangelical churches by the German Christians . He became a member of the Pastors' Emergency League and joined the Confessing Church (BK), in which he took on several important offices: spokesman for the Old Prussian State Brothers Council and member of the Reich Brothers Council . At the Dahlem Confessing Synod in 1934 he gave a lecture on the subject of "The right of church self-help". He also campaigned against the misappropriation of church collections for Nazi purposes.

On November 27, 1935, he met with a group from the Old Prussian State Brotherhood Council with Reich Church Minister Kerrl in his office. After an argument, the men left the conversation protesting. At the Confessing Synod of Bad Oeynhausen in 1936 he was elected chairman of the provisional leadership of the German Evangelical Church . At the same time he had taken over the chairmanship of the regional brotherhood of the Old Prussian Union from Karl Koch . During these years he was arrested and interrogated several times by the Gestapo . He was the first to sign a memorandum from the BK to Hitler , in which u. a. the establishment of concentration camps was denounced. In September 1938 he was one of the authoritative authors of a prayer liturgy in which the occupation of Czechoslovakia was condemned. Since then the arrests of clergymen have increased, but the church leaders also pushed these confessional pastors out of their offices. After disciplinary proceedings against Müller, Martin Albertz and Hans Böhm , he was removed from office on March 20, 1939 and expelled from the rectory. A year earlier, his wife had died of a serious illness. So, on the advice of friends, he decided to join the Wehrmacht and thus avoid further persecution. First in France and Belgium, and most recently in the Soviet Union, he worked as a so-called grave officer. There he was however the victim of a poison attack , to which he succumbed. He was buried in the military cemetery of Szoltzy .

Müller was married to Martha, born in 1921 . Florstedt, who died in 1938, and the father of his daughter Beate.

Publications

• Thoughts on the constitution of the German Evangelical Church , 1936.
• Unity and Order of the Church , 1937.
• The minister's service to living people , 1938.

literature

• Werner Oehme : Martyrs of Protestant Christianity 1933–1945. Twenty-nine life pictures . Berlin 1979, pp. 106-113.
• Hannelore Braun, Gertraud Grünzinger: Personal Lexicon on German Protestantism 1919-1949 . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 978-3-525-55761-7 , p. 181.