Joachim Pfannschmidt (Pastor)

Joachim Pfannschmidt , completely Joachim Friedrich Gustav Pfannschmidt (born July 6, 1896 in Berlin , † May 1, 1945 in Groß Kiesow ) was a German Evangelical Lutheran clergyman and a member of the Confessing Church.

Life

Joachim Pfannschmidt as a child (left) with his family

Joachim Pfannschmidt came from a family of artists and theologians. He was the third child and the older son of the sculptor Friedrich Pfannschmidt . The Berlin pastor and local researcher Martin Eckart Pfannschmidt and the painter Ernst Christian Pfannschmidt were his uncles.

He studied Protestant theology at the Universities of Tübingen, Greifswald and Berlin and, like his father, was active in Wingolf . In 1922 he passed his first and in 1924 his second theological exam.

After his ordination on May 29, 1924, he received his first service assignment as assistant preacher in the Luther Foundation's deaconess mother house in Frankfurt / Oder . In the same year he was appointed pastor in Steimke in the Altmark . In 1930 he moved to the St. Laurentius Church (Groß Kiesow) .

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  Gross Kiesow Church

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  Groß Kiesow rectory

With the takeover of power by the National Socialists and the beginning of the church struggle , he joined the Confessing Church and became one of its leading personalities in the church province of Pomerania . In 1934 he also became a member of the Evangelical Michael Brotherhood .

He refused to decorate the church with the swastika flag and was prosecuted "for not flagging his parish church on the occasion of a party holiday".

Stumbling block for Gertrud Birnbaum in front of her last house in Uslar

Through the agency of the Grüber office , he and his family took in the pharmacist and baptized Jew Gertrud Birnbaum (1897–1956) in the Groß Kiesow rectory from the beginning of 1940. Disguised as a refugee, she remained undiscovered. At the end of 1944 she joined a group of refugees from Upper Silesia and came back to Uslar , where the pharmacist Heinrich Welter hid her in the back of his pharmacy until the end of the war. Since 2008, a stumbling block has been remembering her in Uslar, inspired by a project by the Solling School .

When the Red Army marched in on May 1, 1945, he was shot dead on the night he refused to reveal his daughters' hiding place.

In his first marriage he was with Luise, geb. Kähler, the daughter of the Greifswald lawyer Wilhelm Kähler . The couple had four children. After her death he married Hilde, geb. Teichmüller (1906–2003), and had five other children with her.

In May 2005, his life and death was one of the fates that a commemorative event of the Pomeranian Evangelical Church in St. Nikolai Cathedral (Greifswald) commemorated.

literature

• Martin Gilbert : The Righteous. The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust. Henry Holt & Company, London 2003 ISBN 978-0-8050-6260-1 , p. 185.
• Harald Schultze, Andreas Kurschat (Ed.): "Your end looks at ..." Protestant martyrs of the 20th century. Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, Leipzig 2006, p. 393.

Web links

• Literature about Joachim Pfannschmidt (pastor) in the state bibliography MV

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Gerhard Besier , Eckhard Lessing (ed.): Separation of State and Church, Church-Political Crises, Renewal of Church Community (1918–1992. (= The History of the Evangelical Church of the Union 3), Evangelische Verlags-Anstalt, Leipzig 1999 ISBN 978-3-374-01720-1 , p. 304, note 58
2. ^ Roland Fleischer: Jewish Christian members in Baptist congregations in the "Third Reich". In: Hans-Joachim Leisten (Ed.): Like everyone else. Baptist congregations in the Third Reich as reflected in their Festschriften. WDL-Verlag, Hamburg 2010, ISBN 9783866821378 , pp. 157-184 ( full text  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. )  
3. ↑ Remembrance of people and fates in the Pomeranian Evangelical Church. Documentation for the memorial event on May 4, 2005 in St. Nikolai Cathedral, Greifswald Greifswald: PEK 2005 ISBN 978-3-9811527-0-8 , p. 32 ( digitized version )