Johannes Schröder (pastor)

Johannes Schröder (born December 12, 1909 in Kiel ; † July 28, 1990 there ) was a Protestant pastor and resistance fighter in the National Committee for Free Germany . His wife Ingeborg and his children were interned in various camps as clan prisoners, possibly as a bargaining chip for negotiations with the Western Allies.

Life

Parental home and studies

Johannes Schröder was born the son of the city mission inspector Johannes Schröder and his wife Selma. After graduating from high school, he studied Protestant theology at the theological school in Bethel from the summer semester of 1928 , then at the universities of Erlangen, Göttingen and Kiel. He became a member of the Erlanger , Kiel and Göttingen Wingolf .

First pastor and military chaplain

In 1934 Johannes Schröder took up his first pastor's position in Osterhever . In the same year he married the teacher's daughter Ingeborg Siems. He became a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Confessional Community. State Church of Schleswig-Holstein . From July 1935 on, he worked as a pastor in Albersdorf (Holstein) . In autumn 1936, Schröder volunteered for military service and served in Eckernförde , then in Wilhelmshaven on Wangerooge , most recently as a reserve officer candidate . In 1938, Schröder opted for military chaplaincy . From January 1939 he was pastor in Neumünster and was finally taken over by the Wehrmacht on July 1, 1939 . During the war, he was the deputy evangelical parish pastor in Münster , and from mid-October 1940 he was divisional pastor.

National Committee Free Germany

As a division pastor, he was captured with the 371st Infantry Division at the Battle of Stalingrad . There he joined the National Committee Free Germany (NKFD). On June 16, 1944, Johannes Schröder was co-founder of the “Working Group for Church Issues” at the 10th full meeting of the NKFD in Lunjowo . Also present were around 30 theologians of both denominations who had been captured as Wehrmacht priests as well as officers, NCOs and soldiers. Johannes Schröder was appointed or unanimously elected head of the working group at the suggestion of Erich Weinert and thus probably on the instructions of the leadership of the KPD in exile . The Protestants Friedrich-Wilhelm Krummacher and Nikolai Sönnichsen as well as the Catholics Josef Kayser, Peter Mohr and Aloys Ludwig also belonged to the leadership group .

Johannes Schröder also caused displeasure when, in a sermon on July 28, 1944, he described the leaders of July 20 as "serious Christians who are aware of their responsibility". They would have given the “signal to be raised”. From this, Schröder concluded the appeal: "The near future will require every German, every Christian in the German state to make the same decision, to have the same courage, to fight the same."

Kinship for the Schröder family

After the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944, the National Socialists expanded “kin imprisonment” as a measure of repression. Following a meeting of Heinrich Himmler , Wilhelm Keitel and Adolf Hitler in the Wolf's Lair on July 30, 1944, a continued mass arrests of members of the resistance fighters one, including the relatives of John Schröder and all other families whose relatives the founding manifesto of the National Committee for a Free Germany of July 13, 1943 in Soviet captivity, as well as the families of the July 20 “conspirators”. Group XI of the Special Commission under SS-Sturmbannführer Karl Neuhaus was responsible for the execution of the “kin detention”. In the months of July and August of 1944 alone, more than 140 people were interned as "clan prisoners".

Ingeborg Schröder was arrested on August 15, 1944 by order of the Reich Main Security Office in Neumünster and taken to Kiel the following day . Their children Hans-Dietrich, Harring and Sibylle-Maria came to the children's homes of the National Socialist People's Welfare (NSV) in Heiligenhafen , later in Bad Segeberg . On October 6, 1944, the Kiel State Police Office informed the Secret State Police of the Schwerin State Police Office that Ingeborg Schröder had been "detained".

In the meantime, proceedings for high treason were opened against Johannes Schröder in his absence before the Reich Court Martial . During a house search , a letter from farmer August Hering from Breesen in Mecklenburg was found, who had informed Ingeborg Schröder that her husband was speaking on the national committee for Free Germany. August Hering was sentenced to death for listening to the broadcaster Free Germany . On October 7, 1944, Ingeborg Schröder was released from police custody to her parents' apartment in Kiel. In November she returned to Neumünster, where she stayed until March 4, 1945. To avoid further persecution, she was under pressure to follow advice to divorce her husband. Thereupon she got her children back, whom she could pick up from the home in Bad Segeberg at the end of December 1944.

On February 5, 1945, the head of the Wehrmacht High Command Wilhelm Keitel issued the order: For Wehrmacht members who commit treason while being prisoners of war and are therefore legally sentenced to death, the clan is liable with property, freedom or life. The Reichsführer SS and chief of the German police determine the extent of the kin liability in individual cases. Four weeks later, on March 8, 1945, Ingeborg Schröder and her children were taken by train to Weimar , where a sister of the National Socialist People's Welfare accompanied them. Then on March 9th they were taken by SS guards to Buchenwald concentration camp , where other “clan prisoners” were.

On April 6, 1945, Ingeborg Schröder arrived with her children in the transport of the “clan and special prisoners” on the way to the Dachau concentration camp in Markt Schönberg , where she stayed until April 16, after which she was transferred to the Dachau concentration camp, the actual assembly point of the both transports. Other special prisoners from the Flossenbürg and Mauthausen concentration camps were brought together there. In the end there were 139 prisoners from seventeen European countries who were deported as hostages of the SS in three transports to the "SS special camp Innsbruck". In the retreat area of ​​the “ Alpine Fortress ” they were supposed to serve as a bargaining chip for negotiations with the Western Allies for the Chief of the Security Police and the SD , SS-Obergruppenführer and Police General Ernst Kaltenbrunner . In the Reichenau camp , for example, B. also the former Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg interned. The hostages came from Tyrol, closely guarded by an escort unit of the SS and SD, to South Tyrol, where they were freed from the violence of the SS in Niederdorf in Hochpustertal on April 30, 1945 by soldiers of the Wehrmacht under the command of Captain Wichard von Alvensleben . Alvensleben also took over the protection of the prisoners and brought them to the Hotel Pragser Wildsee. American soldiers took over the prisoners on May 4, 1945. The Americans brought her to Capri in two transports on May 8 and 10, 1945. On June 29th, Ingeborg Schröder returned to Neumünster with her children.

Johannes Schröder only found out about his family's fate after the war in captivity through a radio address by the Munich cathedral capitular Johannes Neuhäusler on the Vatican Radio .

After 1945

On December 8, 1945 Schröder was able to return to Germany, initially to Berlin. There the church tried to win him over to work in the Soviet occupation zone . His contacts with the Soviet occupation forces made him appear as an important mediator of church interests. In February 1946 the church leadership of the Evangelical Church of the Old Prussian Union appointed him Senior Consistorial Councilor and entrusted him with the duties of a consultant to the Evangelical Upper Church Council . Out of consideration for his family and because he did not agree with Otto Dibelius' church political course, he did not return to Berlin. With his friend Friedrich-Wilhelm Krummacher , who he had made in Lunjowo and with whom he had headed the church working group of the NKFD, he found no understanding for this decision. However, their friendship survived this dissent. On February 7, 1946, Schröder made his last radio broadcast, now from East Berlin . He was talking about Stalingrad. In March 1946 he saw his family again after years of separation. From June 1946 he worked as a pastor in Neumünster. In October 1955 he became the first full-time social pastor in Kiel. Since November 1957 he was the state pastor of the Inner Mission in Rendsburg and the representative for the aid organization of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Schleswig-Holstein . On April 1, 1960, he was appointed regional church councilor in a secondary position. Schröder retired on January 1, 1975.

filming

The fate of the so-called clan prisoners shortly before the end of the war was filmed in a two-part drama documentary Wir, Geiseln der SS in 2014/2015 . Ingeborg Schröder (played by Isabelle Barth ) and her children Hans-Dietrich (Philipp Franck), Harring (Camillo Schlagintweit) and Sibylle-Maria ( Anastasia C. Zander ) are also discussed here. Johannes Schröder's children Hans-Dietrich and Sibylle-Maria Schröder report as contemporary witnesses in the documentation of the experiences, fears and liberation of that time.

literature

• Bodo Scheurig: traitors or patriots. The National Committee "Free Germany" and the Association of German Officers in the Soviet Union 1943–1945 . Propylaeen, Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-549-07236-8 (revised and supplemented new edition by ders., Free Germany , Munich 1960).
• Peter Godt: Johannes Schröder (1909–1990) , in: Karl Ludwig Kohlwage , Manfred Kamper, Jens-Hinrich Pörksen (eds.): “What is right before God”. Church struggle and theological foundation for the new beginning of the church in Schleswig-Holstein after 1945. Documentation of a conference in Breklum 2015 . Compiled and edited by Rudolf Hinz and Simeon Schildt in collaboration with Peter Godzik , Johannes Jürgensen and Kurt Triebel, Husum: Matthiesen Verlag 2015, pp. 202–207 (online at geschichte-bk-sh.de) .

Web links

• Short biography Protestant Resistance Online exhibition Resistance !? - Protestant Christians under National Socialism.
• We hostages of the SS - Odyssey before the end of the war - ZDF documentary

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Complete directory of Wingolf 1991
2. ↑ http://www.geschichte-bk-sh.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Quellen/Pastoren_der_BK_in_SH.pdf
3. ^ Protestant Christians in the Resistance - Johannes Schröder on July 20
4. ↑ Protestant Christians in the Resistance - Johannes Schröder Back in Germany
5. ↑ Cathy de Haan: The fate of the special prisoners, FR online, April 7, 2015.
6. ^ Gebrüder Beetz Production: "We, hostages of the SS"