Gereon Goldmann

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Gereon Goldmann OFM (born October 25, 1916 in Ziegenhain ; † July 26, 2003 in Fulda ) was a Franciscan priest who worked in Japan and India . He was a member of the Waffen SS and later became known as the Tokyo Ragman .

Youth and early years

Karl Heinrich Goldmann was born in 1916 as one of seven children of the Fulda veterinarian Dr. Karl Goldmann and his wife Margarethe Goldmann, b. Holling († 1924) was born in Ziegenhain . When Karl was born, his father was serving as a soldier in the First World War on the Western Front. After his parents moved back to Fulda in 1919 and the veterinary council remarried in the late 1920s (the younger sister of his first wife) - five children were the result of this marriage - the family moved to Cologne in 1931 , where he established the Schiller- Attended high school in Cologne . There Goldmann became a member of the youth movement Bund Neudeutschland, founded by Jesuits in 1919 . After graduating from high school in 1936, he committed himself to the Reich Labor Service in Rethem an der Aller for six months . On October 10, 1936, he entered the Franciscan order. On December 7, 1943, he took his religious vows and took the religious name Gereon.

Wehrmacht, Waffen-SS and ordination as a priest

Monte Cassino Monastery February 1944

On August 28, 1939, one day after completing his philosophy degree, Goldmann was drafted into the Wehrmacht . The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, and joined the Waffen SS in the same year. There he was stationed on the Polish border in a barrack camp called the earthworm camp . During the French campaign , he was promoted to Obersturmmann by the unit commander in front of Les Islettes for rescuing several wounded. He was not awarded the Iron Cross because of his membership in the Franciscan Order. He then became an officer candidate and successfully participated in an officer training course for the Waffen SS. Before he was appointed officer, he should have declared his exit from the Catholic Church, which he did not. He was then reassigned to the Wehrmacht in 1942. In September 1942, Goldmann was arrested and tried before a court martial in Kassel for undermining military strength and sentenced to frontline deployment in Russia. He owed the sentence, which was not for immediate execution , to a captain who was a Protestant pastor. During his time with the Waffen-SS, there was a personal interview with the Reichsführer of the SS, Heinrich Himmler . This promised him the free choice of faith until the time of the final victory .

After being arrested again, Goldmann remained in custody until the winter of 1943, was first transferred to France, and later used as a member of the 29th Panzer Grenadier Division on the landing in Sicily . While on vacation at home, he came into contact with the resistance fighter Adam von Trott zu Solz , for whom he later provided courier services to France and Italy. One such courier service took him to Rome in January 1944, where he delivered a message to a liaison officer at the German embassy. As a thank you Goldmann was able to have an audience with Pius XII. to obtain. This granted a special power of attorney for ordination .

On January 30th, Goldmann was taken prisoner by the Allies on Monte Cassino and was subsequently interned in POW camps in Morocco and Algeria. On June 24, 1944 he was ordained a priest in Notre Dame de Rivet , a church near a prisoner of war camp in Algeria. From August 1944 he worked as a camp chaplain in Ksar-es-Souk , Morocco . At the end of 1945 Goldmann was arrested and taken to Meknes , Morocco. There he was brought before a court martial by French allies and sentenced to death by shooting. February 1946 he was shortly before the execution on the intercession of Pius XII. pardoned. The sentence was commuted to camp detention. March 7, 1947, he attended briefly barbed wire seminary of Chartres . After his release in 1947 he returned to Fulda. Between 1948 and 1949 he was arrested again and this time brought to justice by American allies. The case was dropped for lack of evidence. After studying theology for a year, Goldmann devoted himself to pastoral activities. His main focus was on youth work.

Pastoral activity in Japan and India

In early 1954 Goldmann traveled to Japan to become the leader of the St. Elisabeth parish in Tokyo's Itabashi district . Affected by the misery prevailing in Itabashi, he began to earn his living as a rag collector between 1954 and 1961 and to support the poor with the surpluses. The "Lumpensammler-Studienstiftung" founded by him made it possible for around a hundred people to study in the following years. For this he was honored with a medal by Tennō Hirohito in 1965 . In addition, his social commitment included the construction of churches, homes, hospitals, social stations and the establishment of a social service for the beggars and the neglected by collecting donations and arranging interest-free loans for the needy. These loans made it possible to build 50 social housing. His pastoral work has included baptisms, lectures, and sermons across Japan. From 1965 he extended his involvement to India. Until 1994 he worked there for the construction of homes, churches, monasteries and hospitals in the Mission Province of the Carmelites in Kerala . In 1975 he founded the St. Gregorius Institute for Church Music and Liturgy in Tokyo. The institute was inaugurated on September 26, 1979, and Goldmann became head of the institute. As a result, he handed over the leadership of his parish to a successor.

In 1993 Goldmann received a visit from the Japanese imperial couple Akihito and Michiko in the St. Maria children's home, which he founded, in recognition of his social commitment. The amount of donations he has collected is estimated at 50 million marks . In 1994, after a serious illness caused by a heart condition, he returned to Fulda exactly to the day after 40 years. There he lived in the city's Franciscan monastery until his death in 2003 . He died on July 26th at the age of 87. His grave is in the monastery cemetery.

His autobiography Deadly Shadows - Comforting Light has already appeared in English, French, Spanish, Polish, Croatian and Slovak and a further eleven languages. The book publisher " Bergisch Gladbach Freundeskreis Gereon Goldmann ofm" also takes care of his literary work .

Awards

Works

  • Deadly shadows - comforting light. A Franciscan in uniform . 15th edition. EOS, Sankt Ottilien 2010, ISBN 978-3-8306-7138-1 (revised edition).
  • Gereon Goldmann, Josef Seitz: SOS with echo . Experience report on aid operations in southern India. Seitz, Dillingen 1970.

literature

  • Michael Mott : He was called "the rag collector of Tokyo" / from the adventurous life of Karl Gereon Goldmann OFM (born October 25, 1916 in Ziegenhain; † July 26, 2003 in Fulda) a Franciscan priest who was active in Japan and India. He was a member of the Waffen SS and later came to be known as the Tokyo Ragman; in: Yearbook of the District of Fulda 2016/2017, 44th year, pp. 45 to 59 (with 20 templates).
  • Portrait: Father Gereon Goldmann - from "Schiller" to the Waffen-SS to missionary. In: E. Burckhard Schmitz: The history of the Schiller-Gymnasium Cologne (1899-2015). Schiller-Gymnasium, Cologne 2015, p. 67 ( online , PDF; 11.2 MB).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Burkhard Schmitz: The history of the Schiller-Gymnasium Cologne since 1899 . Part 3 - In the Third Reich (1933–1945). Ed .: Schiller-Gymnasium Cologne. ( PDF document (4 MB) ( Memento of July 14, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) [accessed on December 12, 2010]). The history of the Schiller-Gymnasium Cologne since 1899 ( Memento from July 14, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ^ Karl-Heinz Kloidt: Chartres 1945. Seminar behind barbed wire . A documentation. Herder, Freiburg 1988, ISBN 3-451-21198-X .
  3. ↑ A rare saint on internetredaktion.com
personal data
SURNAME Goldmann, Gereon
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Goldmann, Karl Heinrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Franciscan
DATE OF BIRTH October 25, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH Goat grove
DATE OF DEATH July 26, 2003
Place of death Fulda