Georg D. Heidingsfelder

Georg D. Heidingsfelder (born October 14, 1899 in Dinkelsbühl , † February 26, 1967 in Wennemen near Meschede ) was a German journalist. He campaigned against the NSDAP , became “selected citizen” after the war and campaigned against rearmament .

Georg D. Heidingsfelder, date unknown

family

Georg Heidingsfelder was born into a Protestant family as the son of a police officer and a teacher. He grew up in Ansbach and started working as a journalist there. He later converted to Catholicism and in this context took the additional name " Dismas ". Heidingsfelder was married to Elisabeth Kürten, with whom he had six children: Leonore, Gregor, Thomas, Elisabeth, Margret and Georg; the youngest son, Georg Heidingsfelder, made a name for himself as a visual artist and graphic artist.

time of the nationalsocialism

In 1933 Georg D. Heidingsfelder had to give up his position as an editor as a Nazi opponent and supported his family as a banker at the rural central bank in Meschede . Since 1939 he has organized regular Catholic evening events in which the Nazi regime was sharply attacked. The Mesched parish vicar Franz Josef Grumpe described this work in a testimony as follows:

“Mr. Georg Heidingsfelder has been active in Catholic youth work since 1939, in which he instructed especially the youth of the upper classes of secondary schools in the Catholic 'Weltanschauung' (as the preschool of religion). The ideological and intellectual debate with the Nazi powers was always in the foreground. Mr. H. not only did not avoid this argument, but led it with such clear sharpness that one had to be worried for his head if the students did not shut up. The party, which got wind of the evening training work, tried to intimidate Mr. H. by withdrawing child allowances. When he continued his work anyway, other means of pressure followed, which finally forced Mr. H. to go into hiding with the Wehrmacht "

- Parish Vicar Franz Josef Grumpe : Meschede in December 1947

For Heidingsfelder, the risk of being arrested increased as the conflict between Nazi organizations and the Catholic Church intensified. The first ecclesiastical target of the Gestapo in Meschede was the Königsmünster Abbey . In 1940 the Catholic school of the monastery had to be handed over to the city, on March 19, 1941 the monastery was confiscated. Some of the monks were arrested, others drafted into the armed forces. Heidingsfelder still protected the ecclesiastical environment in the strongly Catholic Meschede, but that this protection was not permanent, it became more and more obvious.

Heidingsfelder therefore volunteered for the Wehrmacht. He became a private overseer in a military prison and developed a fundamental rejection of the military and war there due to the brutality of the overseers.

post war period

Selected Citizen

After the war, Heidingsfelder was trained as a Nazi opponent by the Americans in Cherbourg with 150 other selected, Nazi-critical German intellectuals to be "selected citizen" and thus belonged to a group of people who should build a democratic Germany. He therefore received various job offers as a journalist, including from the Mescheder Westfalenpost and the Westfälische Rundschau , which he rejected due to the attitude of the press towards rearmament and reunification. A quote from the rejection of the position as editor of the Westfalenpost makes Heidingsfelder's position clear:

“... because I wanted to be counted among those who feel themselves pilgrims and strangers in this wonderful world of prosperity and would rather perish in poverty than give up just one iota of their conviction that this Christian West is a world of lies. "

The Mescheder Atonement Cross

On March 22, 1945, an SS division zV (in retaliation) between Eversberg and Meschede murdered 80 Russian and Polish forced laborers during the massacre in the Arnsberg Forest .

“On March 28, 1947, the residents of Meschede in the Sauerland were affected by the message that a mass grave of foreign workers had been discovered in front of their gates. The excavations revealed that 80 work slaves of foreign origin had been buried here at the end of the Hitler War. According to the medical records, all of the dead were shot in the head and severely injured to the skull, which suggests that they had been forcibly killed. Uniform uniforms and finds in the pockets showed that they were Russian and Polish forced laborers. "

- Pax Christi

Heidingsfelder and other members of the “Working Committee of the Catholic Male Community” such as Parish Vicar Grumpe and Father Harduin, who later became the abbot of the Mesched Benedictine monastery, decided to erect a “Atonement Cross” as a symbol of the Christian will to atonement. From the beginning, this plan was sharply criticized both by church authorities and by many citizens. On May 4th, the cross was erected near the excavation site and was badly damaged by strangers for the first time at Pentecost. As a result, there was repeated damage from ax blows, fire, etc. The atonement cross idea received support from Paderborn.

“As far as I was able to do in conversations, I tried to shed light on the events surrounding the cross desecration. I must express to you that your concern is justified and necessary and that we Christians cannot dispense with the willingness to atone for our own or others' guilt.

The removal of the atonement cross is very much to be regretted, indeed to be condemned, and all the more sharply since emotions of hatred of the nations and the urge to retaliate have determined the action. Certainly there are some psychological reasons which explain the rejection of the atonement cross in the first post-war years, but can never justify it.

I would appreciate it if the re-erection of the cross in Meschede would find general approval. From here I am not able to give the concrete ways for the realization of this wish of mine. "

- Lorenz Cardinal Jäger, Archbishop of Paderborn

In Meschede, the atonement cross repeatedly led to heated discussions, especially about the question of collective guilt. The cross was desecrated and torn from its anchoring four times. Contemporary witness Karl Schaefer attributes the fight of many Mesheds against the atonement cross to the fear of Russian vengeance. He describes a citizens' meeting in the auditorium of the grammar school, in which Heidingsfelder was booed as the initiator, the church representatives Grumpe and the Jesuit priest and papal advisor Gundlach met with rejection. On the evening of June 11th, the cross finally disappeared. In response to public pressure, its builders had buried the badly damaged cross in a hidden place. In 1981 it was excavated as part of the Meshed Peace Week and placed in the Church of the Assumption of Mary.

• 

  Assumption Day

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  The atonement cross

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  Dedication in the chapel

Catholic opposition to rearmament

Federal President Gustav Heinemann (stamp series)

Heidingsfelder was initially head of education for the Catholic workers' movement , but resigned from this position in 1950 when the CDU decided to rearm. The main source of income afterwards were activities as a freelance journalist and book author. From 1952 to 1953 he published the magazine "Katholische Freiheit". In 1951 he found an ally in the writer Reinhold Schneider , by whom he published various essays in the “Katholische Freiheit”, and he established contacts with other opponents of rearmament. Heidingsfelder ran into increasing difficulties when he began to write articles for the weekly newspaper Voice of Peace from 1951 to 1952 . Heidingsfelder was attacked as a communist and increasingly marginalized in the conservative Meschede.

The debate about rearming the Federal Republic within the framework of the European Defense Community (EVG), which was carried out on May 27, 1952, led to violent political disputes in advance. The interior minister of the first government of the Federal Republic, Gustav Heinemann , resigned as minister on October 9, 1950 and left the CDU on November 14, 1952, on November 29, 1952 he founded the " All-German People's Party " in Frankfurt . The main goals were the fight against rearmament and the integration of the German states into the hostile power blocs and thus the task of reunification. Georg Heidingsfelder belonged to the group of Catholic war opponents in the party for which he ran in the 1953 federal election in the constituency of Meschede-Olpe . The party remained unsuccessful despite prominent supporters.

Late years

Reinhold Schneider

When contact with Reinhold Schneider broke off, Heidingsfelder tried, as editor of the magazine Umschau im Katholizismus, to continue his resistance to rearmament on his own. This publication appeared from 1954 to 1956. After the failure of this magazine, too, Heidingsfelder could no longer support his family as a journalist and managed to get by as unskilled workers in Wuppertal factories.

As a pensioner with little means, Heidingsfelder finally had to give up his apartment in Meschede and spent the last years of his life as a subtenant on a farm in Bockum near Meschede. Shortly before death, he instructed his relatives to put a quote from Reinhold Schneider on his obituary:

"I've seen enough for my ticket."

Dialect poetry

Georg D. Heidingsfelder wrote aphorisms, poems and plays in the dialect of his Franconian hometown Ansbach . Both folk texts on the world of the Ansbacher family and literary texts that go far beyond the boundaries of good local poetry can be found. A short passage from Heidingsfelder's dialect book Mir san lawendi is quoted as an example :

"As the Council of the City of Damascus decided that the 'Feldzuuch geecher the rat plague' poison gas should be warrn in the canals neibloosn, older Ratz said: 'It would always be nice to know that we would be more than a man!"

- Georg D. Heidingsfelder

Fonts

• Peter Bürger (ed.): Collected writings. A source edition on the left Catholic nonconformism of the Adenauer era. Norderstedt 2017. - Volume 1: ISBN 978-3-7431-3416-4 ; Volume 2: ISBN 978-3-7448-2123-0 ( online version )
• 1000 words of Ansbachian. Brügel & Sohn, Ansbach 1930.
• Thomas More, life and work. Amberg 1950.
• (Ed.), The Unknown Platen. Wiedfeld & Mehl, Ansbach 1966.
• It Anschbacher Bichla. Ansbach o. J.
• The struggle between Christianity and communism. Edited by the working group for applied anthropology. Göttingen, 1956. - 71 pages - (series of publications / working group for applied anthropology).
• Mir senn lawendi, a little Franconian dialect book. Ansbach 1963.
• Wehrmacht and Catholic youth [responsible: Georg Heidingsfelder]. - 2nd edition Krefeld 1955, 32 pp.
• From “Selected Citizen” to factory worker. Journal article (source unknown).

literature

• Josef Müller, The All-German People's Party. Formation and politics under the primacy of national reunification 1950–1957 . Droste-Verlag, Düsseldorf 1990, ISBN 3-7700-5160-2
• Karl Schaefer: The wooden bowl of the boat. Memories from my childhood in the Third Reich, during the war and in the post-war period. Series: Archives of Contemporary Witnesses. Münster 2006. ISBN 978-3-86582-419-6
• Diether Koch, Heinemann and the question of Germany , Munich (Kaiser) 1972, ISBN 3-459-00813-X
• Alexandra Rickert, Der Fall Georg (Dismas) Heidingsfelder, A West German Journalist and His Connections to the East at the Time of the Cold War , Contribution to the German History Competition 1994/95 (unpublished manuscript)
• CP Klußmann, In memoriam GDH, speech at the grave of GD Heidingsfelder , unpublished manuscript
• Blattmann, Ekkehard [ed.]; Doering-Manteuffel, Anselm; Lütkehaus, Ludger, On the "Reinhold Schneider Case" , Munich; Zurich: Schnell and Steiner; Freiburg [Breisgau]: Catholic Academy 1990, ISBN 3-7954-0277-8
• Martin Stankowski, Left Catholicism after 1945: d. Press of opposition Catholics in d. Dispute for e. democrat. u. socialist. Society , Cologne (Pahl-Rugenstein) [1982], Zugl .: Berlin, Freie Univ., Diss., 1974 udT: Stankowski, Martin: Die leftskatholische Presse in Deutschland after 1945. , ISBN 3-7609-0247-2
• Pax Christi, Das Mescheder Atonement Cross, His story based on an early report by Georg D. Heidingsfelder , Meschede 1986

Web links

Literature by and about Georg D. Heidingsfelder in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ quoted from: Georg D. Heidingsfelder: From “Selected Citizen” to the factory worker. oO, oJ, p. 109.
2. ↑ on the resistance based on Christian convictions in the region cf. Ottilie Knepper-Babilon: Der Kreis Meschede. In this. / Hannelie Kaiser-Löffler: Resistance to National Socialism in the Sauerland. A study of the behavior of the Sauerland population during the Nazi era. Brilon, 2003. v. a. Pp. 30-46
3. ↑ See also the self-description of these processes on the pages of the Königsmünster Abbey : History of the Abbey ( Memento of the original from February 26, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ↑ Georg D. Heidingsfelder, From “Selected Citizen” to the factory worker, o. O., o. J., p. 105ff.
5. ↑ quoted from the speech by CP Klusmann at the grave of Georg D. Heidingsfelder, unpublished manuscript
6. ^ Pax Christi, Das Mescheder Sühnekreuz, His story based on an early report by Georg D. Heidingsfelder , Meschede 1986, p. 3.
7. ^ Pax Christi, Das Mescheder Atonement Cross, His story based on an early report by Georg D. Heidingsfelder , Meschede 1986, p. 7 ff.
8. ^ Letter of June 19, 1964, quoted from Pax Christi, Das Mescheder Sühnekreuz, His story based on an early report by Georg D. Heidingsfelder , Meschede 1986, p. 9.
9. ↑ Karl Schaefer: The wooden bowl of the Kahns. Memories from my childhood in the Third Reich, during the war and in the post-war period. P. 236.
10. ↑ Heidingsfelder, Mir san lawendi, p. 57