Jean Arnold's

Memorial plaque at the chaplaincy in Eupen

Jean Arnolds (born March 7, 1904 in Baelen , † August 28, 1944 in Brandenburg-Görden ) was a Belgian Catholic clergyman and was executed in the Brandenburg penitentiary .

Life

Jean (Johann) Mathieu Joseph Arnolds attended primary school in Welkenraedt and secondary school at the Institut Saint-Roch in Theux . He studied Catholic theology at the seminary in Liege and was on July 1, 1928 by Bishop Louis-Joseph Kerkhofs for priests ordained. He found his first employment as a history teacher at the Collège Patronné (today Pater Damian School ) in Eupen and then as a chaplain at the local parish of St. Nicholas . After 1933 he was targeted by the Nazi - loyal front . With the start of the German attack on Belgium on May 10, 1940, Arnolds was drafted as a medic for military service and after just a few days he became a German prisoner of war .

Arrest and death

After his return he took up a position as chaplain in the small town of Montzen , which was tacitly annexed by the German Reich in May 1940 together with nine other parishes (the Low German parishes ) and was therefore under the administration of the Diocese of Aachen since June 24, 1940 . In Montzen, Arnolds was soon noticed by the Gestapo because he not only - illegally - carried out church youth work, but also worked as an escape helper for prisoners of war. His Montzen address was passed on from word to mouth in the prisoner-of-war camps as far as East Prussia.

On June 22, 1943, two Gestapo officers took him to Aachen, where he was held in solitary confinement in the local prison for ten months . He and his father were tried on April 27, 1944 in Berlin at the People's Court . The father was sentenced to two years in prison, the 4th Senate of the People's Court imposed the death penalty on Jean Arnolds himself for “favoring the enemy” . The verdict stated: “As a chaplain in Montzen in 1941/42, the convicted man helped escaped prisoners of war to escape by providing them with accommodation in the church and in the official apartment, giving them some money and giving them the route to the border “Three requests for clemency by the convicted remained unsuccessful. In mid-August 1944, Reich Justice Minister Otto Georg Thierack ordered the execution of the death sentence. Further requests for clemency from the Archbishop of Mechelen , Cardinal Jozef-Ernest Van Roey , the Bishop of Liège , Louis-Joseph Kerkhof, failed to have an effect, as did a request for clemency from the Bishop of Aachen, Johannes Joseph van der Velden , with which he addressed Adolf Hitler directly turned.

On August 28, 1944, Jean Arnolds was executed with the guillotine in Brandenburg prison.

Honors

The Catholic Church accepted chaplain Jean Arnolds in 1999 as a witness of faith in the German martyrology of the 20th century .

Literature (selection)

• Josse Alzin: Martyrologist 40–45. Le calvaire et la mort de 80 pretres belges et luxembourgeois , Editions Fasbender Arlon 1947, pp. 209-211.
• Ulrich von Hehl : priest under Hitler's terror. A biographical and statistical survey . Paderborn: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh 1996³, Bd. I, Sp. 318. ISBN 3-506-79839-1 .
• Benedicta Maria Kempner : Priest before Hitler's tribunals . Unchanged reprint of the 2nd edition from 1967. Bertelsmann, Munich 1996, ISBN 978-3-570-12292-1 , p. 18-20 .
• Heinrich Toussaint: Bitter experiences. The fate of a war generation in the borderlands . Verlag Grenz-Echo, Eupen, 1988², Vol. 2, pp. 39-55. ISBN 3-923099-52-5 .
• Helmut Moll (Ed. On behalf of the German Bishops' Conference): Witnesses for Christ. The German Martyrology of the 20th Century , Paderborn a. a. 1999, 7th revised and updated edition 2019, ISBN 978-3-506-78012-6 , Vol. I, pp. 27-30.

Web links

• Jean Arnolds in the Ecumenical Lexicon of Saints

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Leo Kever Jean Arnolds, a priest you will never forget , Grenz-Echo, Eupen, 23 August 2014 on freebelgians.be