Georg Valentin Wambsganß

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Georg Valentin Wambsganß (born May 11, 1879 in Speyer , † May 7, 1942 in Landau in the Palatinate ) was a German Protestant pastor during the National Socialist era .

Life

He first attended the Latin school in Grünstadt , then completed a degree in theology and was pastor of Neuhofen in the Palatinate from March 1, 1921 to January 31, 1936 . The clergyman was involved in the Association of Religious Socialists . The political statements of Wambsganß, who as a publicist and speaker in public at the end of the 1920s stood up for the Social Democracy and the Religious Socialists, as their regional executive for the Palatinate, and his violent criticism of what he believed to be a rigid and bourgeois church , earned him the hostility of conservative pastors. His responsible dean Cantzler stated in 1930 that Wambsganß had "removed the population from the church in the workers' community of Neuhofen by advocating the Marxist world and state conception".

With the rise of the NSDAP and the turn of Protestant clergy to National Socialism, these conflicts intensified. The NSDAP targeted Wambsganß as one of the left-wing evangelical pastors in the Palatinate in its polemics. During this time, 107 of the 490 Protestant parishes in the Palatinate owned the NSDAP party book. Of the 434 Catholic pastors at the time, two were party members who were dismissed from service by the bishop for this reason.

As a result, Wambsganß took a direct stand against the political and ideological goals of the National Socialists and attacked the Nazi-friendly tendencies within the Evangelical Church. In 1931, bowing to massive pressure, he resigned the presidency of the Palatinate Religious Socialists. He resigned from the SPD and gave up his seat in the synod of the Palatinate regional church. He retired to his pastoral office.

Now the NSDAP was gracious: "Our concerns about Pastor Wambsganß as a disturbance factor have become obsolete," the local group leader wrote to the church president. His brother Fritz Wambsganß , Gauleiter of the NSDAP in the Rhine Palatinate from 1925 to 1926 , may also have taken care of the re-evaluation of the pastor .

Wambsganß now preached in the spirit of the Nazi dictatorship and took his place. He even took over the office of local director of the National Socialist Welfare Service . He stayed in Neuhofen until 1936.

literature

  • Thomas Fandel: Catholic and Protestant pastors in the Palatinate 1930-1939 . Schöningh, Paderborn 1997.
  • Michael Schepua: National Socialism in the Palatinate Province: Rule practice and everyday life in the communities of today's Ludwigshafen district 1933-1945 (= Mannheim historical research, vol. 20). Mannheim 2000, ISBN 3-920671-40-6 .
  • Hans-Jürgen Wünschel: Drawn by the twilight of his time: Pastor Georg Valentin Wambsganß in Neuhofen . In: Rhein-Pfalz-Kreis: Heimatjahrbuch. - 22 (2006), pp. 109-110.
  • Hans-Jürgen Wünschel: Georg Valentin Wambsganß. In: Ders .: About women and men in the Palatinate (= series of publications by the Office for Palatinate State History at the Department of History of the University of Landau, Vol. 3). Landau 2012, pp. 49–51.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 200th anniversary of the Progymnasium Grünstadt , list of still living students, Riedel Verlag, Grünstadt, 1929, p. 35
personal data
SURNAME Wambsganß, Georg Valentin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician and Protestant pastor
DATE OF BIRTH May 11, 1879
PLACE OF BIRTH Speyer
DATE OF DEATH May 7, 1942
Place of death Landau in the Palatinate