Helmut Schapper

Helmut Leonhard Schapper (born August 1, 1891 in Groß Möringen near Stendal , † April 20, 1976 in Döllnitz ) was a Protestant theologian and, as provost, chief clergyman of the Altmark in the Evangelical Church of the Church Province of Saxony .

Live and act

Helmut Schapper was born the son of pastor Karl Schapper and his second wife Anna Zitzke. After attending school in Stendal he took in 1909 to study theology at the University of Tübingen and was on 3 October 1920, a priest in the Church Province of Saxony the Prussian Union of churches ordained .

In the same year Schapper took over the rural pastor's post in Groß Möringen , where his then blind father served for 42 years. After 1934 Schapper fought vehemently against the ideologization of the church by the German Christians . The clergy of the Altmark provost, who belonged to the Confessing Church , met in his rectory , in which Schapper then became a leader. He was often imprisoned by the Gestapo for his resistance to National Socialism , but due to a lack of solid evidence, he was repeatedly released after a short time. He often had to spend his imprisonment in the prison immediately next to the cathedral in Stendal, in the cell of which he could listen to the cathedral services on Sundays and in which he - the cathedral organist opened the windows and turned up the organ registration volume - participated by lively singing along with the chorales .

Schapper was burdened with family ties and therefore targeted by the Gestapo through the trial of his brother Karl Schapper in 1940 before the People's Court . He was sentenced to death for high treason and executed on February 1, 1941 in Berlin-Plötzensee. Helmut Schapper's plea for clemency was unsuccessful.

After the end of the war and within the reorganization of the now independent Evangelical Church of the ecclesiastical province of Saxony, Helmut Schapper was appointed chief clergyman of the Altmark provost in 1946. The seat of the provost's office was in Stendal , but Schapper stayed in his Möring parsonage and continued to serve there as local pastor.

When the SED gave the GDR the starting signal with a rigorous strategy for the consistent “building of socialism” in 1952, the fight against the church was relentlessly launched: the student communities were assumed to be controlled by the West, and the young community - the youth organization of the church - was defamed as the "extended arm of the terrorist organization BDJ". Helmut Schapper defended himself against the GDR church struggle. In 1953 he was taken into custody, as was the student pastor Johannes Hamel in Halle (Saale) . The "new course" of Otto Grotewohl (he invited for 10 June 1953, the Protestant bishops in East Germany for an interview) then announced the cancellation of all the Church onerous measures, which then also had the release Schapper result.

In 1954 Helmut Schapper ended his tenure as provost of the Altmark and handed over the office to Karl Schaper . In 1963 he retired as pastor, but he did not want to retire: he moved to the parish of Döllnitz , where he was responsible for the pastoral office until his death. His son Gerhard Schapper succeeded him in Groß Möringen and stayed there until 1984, so that three generations of Schapper were pastors for a total of 105 years in that Altmarkdorf.

Helmut Schapper was first married to Bertha Countess von Keller, and his second was to Sophie Heise.

literature

• Uwe Czubatynski, Evangelical Pastor's Book for the Altmark (= contributions to regional and state culture in Saxony-Anhalt, issue 18), Halle, 2000