Gertrud Luckner

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Gertrud Luckner (born September 26, 1900 in Liverpool as Jane Hartmann ; † August 31, 1995 in Freiburg im Breisgau ) was a Christian resistance fighter against National Socialism .

Life

Childhood, youth and education

Gertrud Luckner was born Jane Hartmann, but grew up with foster parents to whom she was given shortly after her birth and who presumably had evangelically baptized her. At the age of 22, she was finally adopted by her foster parents, having recently acquired German citizenship. After attending grammar school in Berlin and Königsberg , she began studying economics at the university there in 1925. At the time, she made a living from language courses, internships in family welfare, maternal counseling, health care and career counseling. Via the University of Frankfurt am Main and the Woodbrooke College of Quakers in Birmingham , she came to the Albert Ludwigs University in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1931 as a graduate economist . Here she acquired the title of Dr. rer. pole. (rerum politicarum) .

Conviction and commitment

Gertrud Luckner's stumbling block in front of the Gertrud-Luckner-Gewerbeschule in Freiburg

Gertrud Luckner was a staunch pacifist ; she had been a member of the Peace Association of German Catholics since 1933/34 and also of the Quakers from 1931 to 1934. In 1934 she was baptized a Roman Catholic and theologically distanced herself from Quakerism, but she remained a pacifist. With these activities she was suspicious of the Nazi regime. The police had been monitoring her mail since 1933.

Luckner began to support Jewish Germans when the Nuremberg Laws were passed (1935) and continued this activity after the Reichspogromnacht (1938). Shortly after the so-called seizure of power, she advised Jews to emigrate and helped them do so. Since 1936 she was employed by Caritas (temporarily together with Eva Laubhardt ) and continued her work for persecuted Jews under the direction and protection of Caritas President Benedikt Kreutz as a counterpart to the Berlin office of Grüber . The Archbishop of Freiburg , Conrad Gröber , gave her the formulated official mandate to protect her in December 1941, stating that she was entrusted with "performing necessary tasks of extraordinary pastoral care". During her travels, she brought the money and material resources entrusted to her, publicly sided with the Jews, went for a walk with them after they were forced to wear the Jewish star in 1941 , or accompanied them to church services and helped them with the war only rarely carried out escape operations from the areas controlled by the German Reich. It was mainly responsible for helping people flee across the Swiss border, sabotaging transport trucks used for the deportation of Jews and searching for safe hiding places for Jews. According to his own statements, Luckner intended to position trustworthy people in a decentralized manner via the Caritas structures in the Reich. These should then form a broad network of helpers. This could not be implemented due to the synchronization of Caritas. Through her personal contact with Leo Baeck , she was able to establish contact with clandestine Jewish structures.

Denunciation, arrest and internment

Due to the denunciation of Luckner by an employee of the Caritas Association in Düsseldorf, the Gestapo learned in the summer of 1942 of a planned relief operation that was carried out a little later. For this purpose, Gertrud Luckner traveled to Düsseldorf, where, with the help of a welfare worker from the Caritas Association ("Frl. Heidkamp"), a Jewish child, whose father had been deported and whose mother had committed suicide before the deportation, in an " Aryan " Accommodate foster family.

Unaware that this action had already been observed and registered by the Gestapo, Luckner continued unabated. After her surveillance had been tightened from autumn 1942 on, Gertrud Luckner was arrested on March 24, 1943 with the help of denunciating information from Franz Xaver Rappenecker, an informant of the Gestapo within the Caritas Association in Freiburg. At the time, she was on a train ride from Freiburg to Berlin to bring Rabbi Baeck 1000 marks to support the Jewish community in Berlin .

A detective of the railway police explained the provisional arrest to her in order to hand her over in Karlsruhe to the Gestapos office in Karlsruhe and to the Düsseldorf police secretary von Ameln. Luckner was then taken to the Wuppertal police prison, where she was interrogated from March 25, 1943 for three weeks "almost every night until the early hours of the morning". From April 14th to July 24th she was housed in the Düsseldorf police prison and then in Berlin in the police prison on Alexanderplatz .

From November 5, 1943 on, Gertrud Luckner was finally interned in the Ravensbrück concentration camp . There she had to wear the red triangle of a "political" one, and was subjected to heavy forced labor . a. for the company Siemens & Halske , obliged and only survived with the help of other fellow sufferers, be it the Liobas sister Eva Placida Laubhardt , the Quaker Hildegard Hansche , the pastoral assistant Katharina Katzenmaier and unknown Viennese communists. The Red Army liberated Ravensbrück on April 30, 1945 , a death march launched by the SS on April 27 to evacuate the camp on which Luckner was on, was overtaken and liberated by the Red Army on May 3, 1945.

Luckner's information and personal assessments

Already after the liberation in 1945, Gertrud Luckner found out from insights into Gestapo files how and by whom she had been monitored and arrested. She “had no feelings of revenge against people in and outside the church who contributed directly or indirectly to my arrest ...” she reported to the attorney general in 1947. Only when she found out in 1945 that Franz Xaver Rappenecker was applying for a significant post did she confront him personally and he confirmed that he had served the Gestapo as an informant. In the Baden government under Leo Wohleb , he became a ministerial director in the Ministry of Economy and Culture. He is still run as an honorary senator by the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg .

Gertrud Luckner assessment According to the Gestapo with the help of spying and later interrogations tried to Freiburg Archbishop Grober as influential supporters of the relief operations to unmask. However, due to Luckner's many contacts abroad, the Gestapo suspected that, together with Gröber, they were even running a news center abroad.

After the liberation

After the war, Gertrud Luckner headed Caritas' welfare for the persecuted. After her retirement in 1968, she continued her work as editor of the Freiburg circular to promote friendship between the old and new people of God - in the spirit of the two testaments , which she founded together with Karl Thieme and a group of committed Freiburg Catholics on the first post-war Catholic day in 1948 . Gertrud Luckner died at the age of 94 in Freiburg im Breisgau, where she also found her final resting place. Your book estate is at the Freiburg University Library .

Honors

Luckner's grave in the Freiburg main cemetery in the grave complex of the Caritas Association
Awarded as Righteous Among the Nations in 1966, archived in the Ida-Seele archive

In 1953 she received the Federal Cross of Merit on Ribbon , in 1960 the Pontifical Cross of Honor and in 1965 the Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class. In 1951 Gertrud Luckner was the first German Catholic to be invited by the State of Israel , and nine years later a Gertrud Luckner grove was planted for her as a Jewish helper near Nazareth . In 1966 the State of Israel honored her in Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations , in 1979 she became an honorary citizen of Freiburg im Breisgau . In 1987 the Freiburger Gewerbeschule IV gave itself the name Gertrud-Luckner-Gewerbeschule in their presence . There is a stumbling block in the sidewalk in front of the school. In 1994, shortly before her death, she received the Baden-Württemberg Medal of Merit .

The German Caritas Association donated a science award of the same name in memory of Gertrud Luckner , which was first awarded in October 2006. The Gertrud Luckner Prize for the Promotion of Science in Social Work is awarded every two years to an outstanding thesis from universities or technical colleges.

On March 31, 2007, Gertrud Luckner was voted the most important personality in Freiburg by the readers of the Badische Zeitung .

In November 2010 the city of Freiburg decided to create the Gertrud Luckner Medal for "extraordinary and lasting services". It was first awarded in February 2011.

Works

  • Contributions to the Christian view of the Jewish question. Publisher of the circular to promote friendship between the Old and New People of God, Freiburg i.Br. 1951.
  • Catholicism and the Jews. Review and outlook after the council. Verl. Bonifacius, Paderborn 1966.
  • (Ed.) Signs of life from Piaski . Letters deported from the Lublin district 1940–1943. Biederstein, Munich 1968 (together with Else Behrend-Rosenfeld).
  • The self-help of the unemployed in England and Wales on the basis of the English history of economy and ideas. Univ., Diss., Freiburg i.Br. 1938.

literature

  • Angela Borgstedt : "... drawn to the people of Israel in a mysterious way". The work of Hermann Maas and Gertrud Luckner for persecuted Jews. In: Michael Kißener (Hrsg.): Resistance against the persecution of the Jews. Universitäts-Verlag Konstanz, Konstanz 1996, ISBN 3-87940-511-5 .
  • Irmgard Dickmann-Schuth: Gertrud Luckner - 26.09.1900 - 31.08.1995. Series Horizonte, Institute for Religious Education of the Archdiocese of Freiburg, Freiburg im Breisgau 1999.
  • Ingeborg Feige (Ed.): The estate of Dr. Gertrud Luckner in the library of the German Caritas Association. German Caritas Association, Freiburg im Breisgau 2004.
  • Elias H. Füllenbach : The Catholic-Jewish Relationship in the 20th Century. Catholic initiatives against anti-Semitism and the beginnings of the Christian-Jewish dialogue in Germany. In: Culture of Remembrance in the Plural Society. New perspectives for the Christian-Jewish dialogue. Edited by Reinhold Boschki and Albert Gerhards , Paderborn et al. 2010 (= Studies on Judaism and Christianity) ISBN 978-3-506-76971-8 , pp. 143–163.
  • Elias H. Füllenbach : Friends of the old and the new people of God. Theological approaches to Judaism after 1945. In: Rottenburger Jahrbuch für Kirchengeschichte 32 (2013), pp. 235–252.
  • Elias H. Füllenbach : "German Catholics write to the Pope". Gertrud Luckner's initiative to promote “Nostra aetate” (spring 1965). In: Catholics and the Second Vatican Council. Petitions, reports, photographs. Edited by Regina Heyder and Gisela Muschiol , Münster 2018, pp. 214–222.
  • Reiner Haehling von Lanzenauer : Gertrud Luckner, helper of the distressed . In: Reinhold-Schneider-Blätter, 17 (2005), pp. 35–57 ( digitized version )
  • Beate Kosmala: Civil courage in an extreme situation. Rescuers of Jews in the “Third Reich” (1941–1945). In: Gerd Meyer et al. (Ed.): Learn civil courage. Analyzes - Models - Working Aids. Federal Agency for Civic Education, Bonn 2004, ISBN 3-89331-537-3 , pp. 106–115, here: p. 111 ( digitized version (PDF; 360 kB) ).
  • Jana Leichsenring:  Luckner, Gertrud. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 23, Bautz, Nordhausen 2004, ISBN 3-88309-155-3 , Sp. 928-933.  ( Article / beginning of article in Internet archive )
  • Hans-Josef Wollasch: Gertrud Luckner. In: Jürgen Aretz (ed.): Contemporary history in life pictures. Aschendorff, Münster 1999, ISBN 3-402-06120-1 .

Web links

Commons : Gertrud Luckner  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Michael Phayer: Questions about Catholic Resistance. In: Church History , Volume 70, No. 2 (June 2001), pp. 328–344, here p. 334.
  2. ^ Michael Phayer: Questions about Catholic Resistance. In: Church History , Volume 70, No. 2 (June 2001), pp. 328–344, here p. 335.
  3. ^ A b Michael Phayer: Questions about Catholic Resistance. In: Church History , Volume 70, No. 2 (June 2001), pp. 328–344, here p. 336.
  4. ^ L iste of the honorary senators of the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg , accessed on February 23, 2013
  5. ↑ Elias H. Füllenbach : "Friends of the old and the new people of God". Theological approaches to Judaism after 1945. In: Rottenburger Jahrbuch für Kirchengeschichte 32 (2013), pp. 235–252.
  6. ↑ Book estate of Gertrud Luckner: Catalog , year of preparation 2013
  7. ^ Honors, in: Social Service Review , Volume 35, No. 1 (March 1961), pp. 79–80
  8. ↑ Righteous Among the Nations from Germany Honored by Yad Vashem by 1 January 2019. (pdf, 619 kB) p. 7 , accessed on March 6, 2020 .
  9. ^ Uwe Mauch: Gertrud Luckner Medal awarded for the first time: For special services to the city. In: Badische Zeitung . February 19, 2011, archived from the original on March 4, 2016 ; accessed on March 6, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Luckner, Gertrud
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hartmann, Jane (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Christian resistance fighter, pacifist
DATE OF BIRTH September 26, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Liverpool
DATE OF DEATH August 31, 1995
Place of death Freiburg in Breisgau