Julius Engelhard (Nazi victim)

Julius Engelhard

Julius Engelhard (born June 5, 1899 in Au am Rhein ; † probably in August 1944 in Brandenburg prison ) was a German Jehovah's Witness and a victim of Nazi war justice.

Life and activity

Early life

Engelhard grew up in a Catholic family. After attending elementary school , he began a commercial training in 1913, which he broke off prematurely due to the closure of his teaching company. From 1915 to 1917 he worked in a Rastatt military hospital of the Red Cross .

In June 1917 Engelhard was drafted into military service with the 109th Grenadier Regiment in Karlsruhe. From March to September 1918 he took an active part as a medic in the First World War, in which he was deployed on the Western Front . After the war Engelhard tried his hand at various professions, including a. as an independent trader.

In 1928 he married. By 1938 the marriage had five children. Although Engelhard had been close to Jehovah's Witnesses since the mid-1920s, the children - even after joining this group - were brought up Catholic at the request of their mother. Unusually for the time, the family has been mixed denominational since Engelhard's conversion to Jehovah's Witnesses in 1930: Engelhard became a Bible student, while his wife and children remained in the Catholic Church.

In April 1930 Engelhard became unemployed in the wake of the global economic crisis , which he was to remain for four years. Around this time he entered the International Biblical Students' Association , which he had not formally joined out of consideration for his Catholic parents and his Catholic wife, despite longstanding sympathies. Manfred Koch considers a connection between economic hardship and religious radicalization in Engelhard's case to be obvious.

Engelhard's unemployment did not end until 1934 when he found employment as a construction worker with various Karlsruhe construction companies.

Nazi era

After the repression of the Jehovah's Witnesses in the German Reich , which began in the wake of the rise of power of the National Socialists in 1933 , which resulted from the group's pacifist worldview and which was officially banned in 1935, Engelhard began to work underground in the interests of his religious community actuate.

In December 1936, Engelhard was arrested while distributing Bible Students' books. This was followed by a six-month prison term. Subsequent arrest and transfer to a concentration camp , which was already a common measure at the time as part of the suppression of Jehovah's Witnesses by the Nazi state, did not take place. After his release from prison he found work as a roofer in Karlsruhe.

In the spring of 1939 Engelhard began to take part in the rebuilding of the illegal organization of the Bible Students in Germany, which had been largely dismantled at that time. At Ludwig Cyranek's instigation , he took over the job of a printer for the Jehovah's Witnesses in June 1939: from July to October he secretly produced 120 prints a week of the matrices he had handed over to his employer in Karlsruhe.

After the outbreak of the Second World War , Engelhard was forced to separate from his family and go underground in order to avoid being forced to serve in the armed forces . In this regard, he was particularly convinced that taking an oath on the National Socialist dictator Adolf Hitler , which he was forced to take when joining the army, would be in contradiction to his obligations to God can serve a master.

Immediately after going underground in October 1939, Engelhard set up an underground printing facility in the apartment of a friend of mine in Bruchsal as the basis for continuing his work as a printer for Jehovah's Witnesses. By February 1940, the two had made several editions of the Bible Students' writings there. At this time Engelhard began to take on tasks as a courier and to distribute some of the copies he had made himself.

In the course of 1940 Engelhard moved into new quarters in Essen and then with the Böke family at Beckstrasse 42 in Oberhausen-Sterkrade. In Oberhausen he began to make the matrices for the prints he had produced himself instead of just printing the matrices supplied by others, as before: From the beginning of 1941 to April 1943, Engelhard produced a total of 27 issues of the Bible Researcher in his underground printing shop. Organ's watchtower , with the edition growing from 240 to 360 at last. In addition, there were the sporadic newsletters of the German distribution center for the watchtower (with editions of up to 250 issues per issue) and various individual writings. With this output Engelhard was one of the most productive printers of the illegal Bible Students community in Germany during the war years.

After Cyranek's arrest and his sentencing to death in March 1941, Engelhard de facto took over his job as the highest functionary of the illegal Bible Students in southern Germany. To this end, he traveled extensively and gave spiritual encouragement to friends of the mind. As a result, his involvement in the illegal Bible Researcher organization grew significantly beyond the technical task of producing prints on the organizational area: During the war years, for example, he set up additional underground printing plants and bases for Jehovah's Witnesses in southern Germany (including Munich, Mannheim, Speyer, Dresden and Freiberg in Saxony) and gave lectures in secret meetings of members of the group, in which he issued slogans to persevere. The high point was a conference of the southern German IBV functionaries in Mannheim in October 1942.

On the evening of April 3, 1943, after returning from a trip to Duisburg, where he had met a fellow believer to whom he had given illegally produced pamphlets from the Biblical Research Association, Engelhard was in his quarters with the B. family by officials from the Gestapo field service Essen expected and taken into custody on the basis of an arrest warrant from the Gestapo Karlsruhe from 1939. In addition, a large amount of material that was incriminating from the regime's point of view was seized (around 1,000 copies of the Watchtower and 500 copies of other scriptures, as well as papers and other materials for the production of the scriptures of Jehovah's Witnesses).

Engelhard, along with seven other Jehovah's Witnesses who had been arrested in raids in the Ruhr area, was charged before the 6th Senate of the People's Court in Berlin for degrading military strength and treacherous favoring the enemy . In the session of June 2, 1944, he was found guilty of “undermining the will of the German people” and “harming the war power of the Reich” and sentenced to death. According to some sources, the execution took place on August 14, 1944 in the Brandenburg prison. However, the literature also states that the place and date of execution are not completely certain.

Today a stumbling block in Karlsruhe reminds of Engelhard's fate.

literature

• Manfred Koch: Julius Engelhard. Printer, courier and organizer of Jehovah's Witnesses. In: M. Bosch / W. Niess (eds.): The resistance in the German south-west against the NS regime 1933–1945 , Stuttgart 1984, pp. 94–103.
• Detlef Garbe: Between resistance and martyrdom. The Jehovah's Witnesses in the "Third Reich". R. Oldenbourg, Munich 4th ed. 1999, pp. 327-341.
• Adalbert Metzinger : People in Resistance - Central Baden 1933–1943 (=  special publication of the Rastatt district archive, volume 13 ). regional culture publishing house, Rastatt 2017, ISBN 978-3-89735-978-9 , p. 82-85 .