Friedrich von Bodelschwingh the Younger

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Friedrich von Bodelschwingh

Friedrich (Fritz) von Bodelschwingh (born August 14, 1877 in Gadderbaum , today Bielefeld , † January 4, 1946 there ) was a German Protestant theologian .

Origin and family

Friedrich von Bodelschwingh grew up as the son of Pastor Friedrich von Bodelschwingh and his wife Ida von Bodelschwingh , née von Bodelschwingh, together with his siblings in the Westphalian noble family von Bodelschwingh . On April 30, 1911 he married Julia , née von Ledebur . His sister-in-law Luise von Ledebur was married to his brother Wilhelm von Bodelschwingh .

From the head of the institution to the designated Reich Bishop

Friedrich studied Protestant theology in Bonn , Basel , Tübingen and Greifswald . After graduating, he joined the Von Bodelschwinghschen Anstalten Bethel , founded in 1867 and taken over by his father Friedrich von Bodelschwingh in 1872, like his two older brothers, and took over its management in 1910.

The Medical Faculty of Heidelberg University awarded him an honorary doctorate with a certificate dated March 23, 1932. On May 27, 1933, he was designated as the first imperial bishop by the triple college of the President of the German Evangelical Church Federation and the Evangelical Upper Church Council of the Evangelical Church of the Old Prussian Union Hermann Kapler , Regional Bishop August Marahrens ( Hanover ) and Hermann Albert Hesse (Elberfeld) , but resigned under pressure from the National Socialists back in June and was replaced by the German-Christian military district pastor Ludwig Müller , who held the office until 1945. Bodelschwingh sided with the Confessing Church in the church struggle .

Work at the time of National Socialism

Postage stamp from 1967
Deutsche Post 1996

Von Bodelschwingh's position on eugenic sterilization was ambivalent . At first he did not shut himself off from the ideas of the hereditary hygienists. In a speech on January 29, 1929 on the subject of “life unworthy of life?” He sat down in the style of contemporary discussion with the “catastrophic development” caused by “the growing number of the weak in body and mind, the inferior” and the then Discussion about “weeding out the inferior”, “unworthy of life” or “inferior” apart. He also showed the possibilities of averting this “threat”, on the one hand sterilization and on the other hand euthanasia . In a lecture at the Protestant specialist conference for eugenics, which was about eugenic sterilization, he said on May 19, 1931: “I would have the courage, provided that all conditions are given and barriers are drawn, here in obedience to God To carry out elimination on other bodies if I am responsible for this body. ”Bodelschwingh stood loyal to the Nazi state and even wrote a call for the Reichstag elections on March 29, 1936 on his own initiative . In addition, on July 21, 1938, he swore the oath of allegiance to Hitler - for a pastor who did not belong to the German Christians , a step that was not necessarily common. As the state intervened in church politics and the racial goals of the National Socialists became clearer, Bodelschwingh's distance from National Socialism grew more and more in the years that followed.

From 1934 onwards, at least 1,176 of the 3,000 disabled residents in Bethel were forcibly sterilized . This was welcomed by von Bodelschwingh. When the systematic murders of the sick began in 1939 with Operation T4 , Bodelschwingh tried, according to Ernst Klee, to secure the continued existence of the Bodelschwingh institutions through "sustained cooperation with the Nazi authorities". He flatly refused to kill sick and disabled people out of Christian conviction. Since May 1940, together with Pastor Paul Braune, he has had some successes against the T4 campaign, the so-called "euthanasia" campaign of the National Socialists. He certainly saved the lives of people with disabilities. On September 21, 1940, seven Jewish patients were initially transferred from his own institution to the state sanatorium and nursing home in Wunstorf by order of the Reich Ministry of the Interior . From there they were taken to the Brandenburg / Havel killing center and killed with gas. In August 1940, Friedrich von Bodelschwingh had made a further advance by writing to Ministerialrat Fritz Ruppert from the Reich Ministry of the Interior : “It would certainly be best if the whole measure were stopped immediately and permanently. If one cannot decide to do so, an orderly procedure must be established. ”On January 6, 1941, he tried again to protest against the“ eradication of life unworthy of life ” in a letter to Hermann Göring , but received a negative answer. The registration forms of the Reich Ministry of the Interior, which arrived at Bethel in June 1940, were never completed. Von Bodelschwingh had also advised other Diakonie institutions to do this. No other patients were evacuated from Bethel.

In the hope of stopping the "euthanasia", von Bodelschwingh relied on what was closest to his character and his political views: he tirelessly established contacts and discussions with authorities, party officials and leading medical professionals, especially Hitler's attending physician Karl Brandt . This testified in the Nuremberg trial that Bodelschwingh was the only serious warning voice that he had met personally:

When I talked to Pastor Bodelschwingh, the only serious warning voice I ever met personally, it seemed at first as if our thoughts were far apart, but the longer we talked and the more we came into the open, the closer and the greater became our mutual understanding. At that time we weren't concerned with words. It was a struggle and a search far beyond the human scope and sphere. When the old Pastor Bodelschwingh after many hours left me and we shook hands, he said as his last word, "that was the hardest struggle of my life." To him as well as to me that struggle remained, and it remained a problem too.

Friedrich von Bodelschwingh-Sohn.jpg

post war period

After the end of the Second World War, Bodelschwingh first commented on the question of guilt in a sermon on May 27, 1945:

“That is why we cannot and do not want to evade responsibility for the guilt and fate of our people. Nor do we want to cover ourselves with the fact that we did not know much of what happened behind the barbed wires of the camps and in Poland and Russia. These crimes are acts of German men and we have to bear their consequences. "

Shortly before his death, Friedrich von Bodelschwingh campaigned for the reorganization of the Protestant Church. Always concerned about the balance between the Confessing Church and the German Christians, he was gladly included in the deliberations about a new beginning. At the first German church leaders conference from August 27 to 31, 1945 in Treysa , Hesse , it was thanks to Bodelschwingh to keep the conference from failing by balancing the various theological, organizational and personal positions. As a co-creator of the EKD , he shaped German Protestantism well beyond the years of his life.

Remembrance day

January 4th in the Evangelical Name Calendar .

Others

Friedrich von Bodelschwingh the Younger is the poet of the hymn Now our hearts belong entirely to the man of Golgotha (1938). He is one of the few people who has appeared three times on a German postage stamp: the German (Federal) Post issued one each in 1967 on the 100th anniversary of the Bethel hospital, in 1977 on his 100th birthday and in 1996 on the 50th anniversary of his death Postage stamp with his likeness out.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Anneliese Hochmuth: Search for traces. Eugenics, sterilization, patient murders and the v. Bodelschwinghschen Anstalten Bethel 1929–1945 , Bielefeld 1997; Ernst Klee : "Euthanasia" in the Nazi state. The "destruction of life unworthy of life". S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 3-10-039303-1 .
  2. ↑ Cf. Stefan Kühl : Eugenics and "Destruction of life unworthy of life": The Bethel case from an international perspective. In: Matthias Benad (ed.): Friedrich v. Bodelschwingh d. J. and the Betheler Institutions. Piety and shaping the world . Stuttgart / Berlin / Cologne 1997, pp. 54–67, here: p. 55. Also quoted from Ernst Klee : Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945 . Second updated edition. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 57.
  3. ↑ Matthias Benad: Bethel's relationship to National Socialism. In: ders., Regina Mentner (Ed.): Zwangsverpflichtung. Prisoners of war and civil slave labor in Bethel and Lobetal 1939–1945 . Bielefeld 2002, pp. 27-66.
  4. ^ 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. 57.
  5. ↑ Kerstin Stockhecke: The v. Bodelschwinghschen Anstalten Bethel under National Socialism , Internet portal Westphalian history
  6. ↑ cf. Anneliese Hochmuth: Searching for traces. Eugenics, sterilization, patient murders and the v. Bodelschwinghschen Anstalten Bethel 1929–1945. Bielefeld 1997.
  7. ^ Friedrich Wilhelm Bautz:  Bodelschwingh, Friedrich von. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 1, Bautz, Hamm 1975. 2nd, unchanged edition Hamm 1990, ISBN 3-88309-013-1 , Sp. 649-651.  ( Article / beginning of article in Internet archive )
  8. ↑ Anneliese Hochmuth: Search for traces. Eugenics, sterilization, patient murders and the v. Bodelschwinghschen Anstalten Bethel 1929–1945. Bielefeld 1997.
  9. ↑ Trial files of the Nuremberg Medical Trial at http://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu/transcripts/1-transcript-for-nmt-1-medical-case?seq=11462&q=Bodelschwingh
  10. ↑ Anneliese Hochmuth: Search for traces. Eugenics, sterilization, patient murders and the v. Bodelschwinghschen Anstalten Bethel 1929–1945. Bielefeld 1997, p. 347; Gerhard Besier , Gerhard Sauter : How Christians Confess Their Guilt. The Stuttgart Declaration 1945. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1985, ISBN 3525521812 , p. 16.
  11. ^ Carsten Nicolaisen : Fritz von Bodelschwingh as a church politician. In: Friedrich v. Bodelschwingh d. J .: Piety and shaping the world. Bielefeld 1997, pp. 82–110, and Jochen-Christoph Kaiser: Fritz von Bodelschwingh as a diakonie politician . In: piety and shaping the world. Bielefeld 1997, pp. 38-53.
  12. ^ Friedrich von Bodelschwingh jun. in the Ecumenical Lexicon of Saints
personal data
SURNAME Bodelschwingh, Friedrich von the Younger
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bodelschwingh, Friedrich von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Protestant theologian
DATE OF BIRTH August 14, 1877
PLACE OF BIRTH Gadderbaum
DATE OF DEATH January 4, 1946
Place of death Gadderbaum