Juliusz lad
Juliusz Bursche (born September 16, 1862 in Kalisz , Congress Poland , Russian Empire , † February 20, 1942 in Berlin ) was a Polish Protestant clergyman , publisher and regional bishop of Poland.
Life
childhood
Juliusz Bursche was the eldest of ten children (in two marriages) of the then vicar of the Evangelical Church in Kalisch, Ernst Wilhelm Bursche , and his first wife Mathilda, née. Müller born. The paternal family came from Silesia ; Ernst Wilhelm's father, a simple Silesian weaver , immigrated to Congress Poland around 1820 and settled in Turek , near Kalisch. After a few years the Ernst Wilhelms family moved to Zgierz near Łódź , where the father was elected pastor . Juliusz's equally famous half-brother Edmund Bursche (1881–1940) was born here.
Studies
In 1872 Bursche began his training at the municipal grammar school (today: Adam-Asnyk- Lyzeum) in Kalisch. After a few years his father was transferred to Płock , where he was appointed superintendent : Juliusz had to leave his hometown and continue his education at the 4th State Gymnasium in Warsaw . After graduating from high school , he enrolled at the Faculty of Protestant Theology at the University of Dorpat . Here he belonged to the Polish compatriot “ Konwent Polonia ” and to the working group of Polish Protestant theologians , which was influenced by the ideas of the Warsaw priest Leopold Otto : Otto was convinced that the time had come with the stereotypical thinking “Pole - Catholic , German - Lutherans ”and that the Protestant Church in Poland is facing new, supranational tasks.
Work as a pastor and head of the church (until 1918)
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After completing his studies, Bursche was ordained pastor in Congress Poland in 1884 . After a brief activity as vicar in Warsaw, he was elected pastor in Żyrardów . In 1888 he returned to Warsaw, where he became a deacon and, in 1898, pastor first priest of the large Lutheran congregation in the Polish capital. Already known earlier as an excellent organizer and preacher, he took up the publishing activity as the successor to Leopold Otto and published a few hundred books with religious content, a magazine ( Zwiastun , “The Annunciation ”) that still exists today, and discontinued it Hymn book that was in use until 1939. Bursche was a founding member of the "Central Committee for Silesia, Kashubia and Masuria" ("Komitet Centraly dla Śląska, Kaszub i Mazur") and supported the establishment of the Masurian People's Party in November 1896. Around 1901 he was elected to the consistory and finally in 1904 to the general -Superintendent, head of the Evangelical Church of Congress Poland. As such, a year later, after the synod of 1905, he succeeded in permitting services in Polish alongside the previously sole ruling German. In the Evangelical Church of the Kingdom of Poland (Congress Poland) founded in 1849, the ethnic Poles formed a minority, which, especially in the Warsaw area, received a constant influx of assimilated Germans. The remaining Evangelicals, who were mainly concentrated in the area of Łódź, Kalisz, Płock as well as in the German settlements on the East Prussian border and in Volhynia , retained the German language and cultural tradition for the most part.
It was Bursch's endeavor to lead the Lutherans resident in Congress Poland to the point where they felt, regardless of their nationality, as confessors of the same denomination. He himself gave church services and excellent sermons without accent in both languages.
In the eyes of the Russian authorities, however, the Lutherans in Congress Poland were still Germans; After the outbreak of war in 1914, the evangelicals began to be deported to Russia proper . Shortly before the Germans took Warsaw in 1915, Bursche himself was taken to Moscow , where he stayed until the first Russian revolution in 1917. The Kerensky government then gave him permission to travel to Stockholm .
In 1916 the occupying powers of the German Empire and Austria-Hungary created an "independent Kingdom of Poland" (called the " Regency Kingdom of Poland ") on the territory of Congress Poland. With the support of the German civil administration and the military authorities, the so-called "Łódź activists" tried to create an independent German Evangelical Church in Poland, whose administration and school system should be completely autonomous from the Polish state. In the absence of the head of the Church, the Warsaw Governor General General Hans von Beseler convened a synod that met in Łódź (October 18-19, 1917) and was supposed to approve the plans of the Łódź activists. The synod brought no result; because the large Warsaw group left them in protest against the politicization of the Evangelical Church.
In the Second Polish Republic (1918–1939)
On February 17, 1918 Bursche returned to Warsaw and was appointed a member of the State Council. Already during the last phase of the reign of the reign he worked out a draft law in which he wrote: “The task of the church is to spread the gospel among Poles, among those Poles who were formerly Germans and bear German names, and among those, the Germans are not to proclaim Poles or Germans ” .
During the entire epoch of the Second Republic, Bursche had to deal with the German-speaking and pro-German opposition within the church. A large group of German-speaking pastors led by Richard Ernst Wagner boycotted and obstructed all of his measures aimed at reconciliation and cooperation between the two population groups. He himself was a loyal citizen of the new Polish state: in 1919 he was sent as an expert to the peace conference in Versailles , where he opposed the plans for a referendum in Warmia , Masuria and West Prussia and demanded the immediate unification of these areas with the Republic of Poland. As early as 1918 he was chairman of the Masurian Committee, the Council of Evangelical Churches in Poland and the Society for the History of the Reformation in Poland. In the vote in the Allenstein voting area , he took over the chairmanship of the (Polish) Masurian Voting Committee (Mazurski Komitet Plebiscytowy), which advocated the annexation of southern East Prussia to Poland. From 1922 to 1939 he was also the publisher and editor-in-chief of Gazeta Mazurska ("Masurian Newspaper").
Bursche's negotiations with the Ministry of Education and Religion in 1936 ended with complete success: the Evangelical Church was granted legal status; he himself became the first regional bishop of his church in 1937. The following synod was boycotted by the German pastors, which ultimately led to the fact that in the spring of 1939 they formed an (illegal, as not recognized by the state) German Evangelical Church in Poland, which declared itself to be independent of the Warsaw Consistory.
In World War II
On September 6, 1939, Bursche received an order from the Polish government to leave the besieged capital and the country. He obeyed the order only halfway and went to Lublin , where he began pastoral work in the local evangelical community. On October 3, he was arrested by the SD and imprisoned in Radom prison, after which he was taken to the Gestapo prison in Albrechtstrasse in Berlin on October 13 . The interrogations were conducted by Reinhard Heydrich . He was accused of betraying his German origins, that he fought against the German Protestant churches in Greater Poland , Upper Silesia and Galicia , that he sought the Polonization of his church, that he worked against the interests of the German Empire in Versailles and Masuria, etc. End In January 1940 he was taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and kept there in the “cell structure” intended for prominent prisoners. Many Protestant bishops and also Catholic circles from all over Europe tried in vain to obtain his dismissal.
At the end of February 1942, the Warsaw Gestapo notified the bishop's daughters that he had died on February 20 of this year at the age of 80 in Moabit Prison .
family
Burrsche married Amalie Helena born in 1885. Krusche, they had a son and three daughters.
Juliusz Bursche's only son Stefan was shot by the Gestapo in 1940. Both have a symbolic grave in the Evangelical Cemetery in Warsaw . The daughter Helena, for many years the principal of the Evangelical Anna Wasa Girls' High School in Warsaw, died in 1975. The second daughter Aniela, after 1945 editor of the church magazine Zwiastun , lived in Warsaw until 1980.
The younger brother of the bishop, Emil Bursche (born June 9, 1872 in Zgierz, † November 10, 1934 in Warsaw) was a doctor and for decades head of the Evangelical Hospital in the Polish capital.
Afterlife
The Nazi authorities refused to hand over the urn with the ashes of the boy. The relatives did not find out whether he really died that day or under what circumstances.
His urn was discovered in October 2017 in the municipal cemetery in Humboldtstrasse in Berlin-Reinickendorf. In November 2018, an urn with earth from the Berlin cemetery was symbolically buried in the Protestant cemetery in Warsaw.
literature
- Asnykowiec (2003 annual of the Asnyklyceum in Kalisch), Kalisz 2003.
- Bogdan Graf von Hutten-Czapski : Sixty Years of Politics and Society . 2 volumes. Mittler, Berlin 1936.
- Eduard Kneifel : Julius Bursche - His life and activity, 1862–1942. Self-published by the author, Vierkirchen near Munich [1980]; online, PDF .
- Eugeniusz Szulc: Cmentarz Ewangelicko-Augsburski w Warszawie. Zmarli i i Rodziny . Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, Warsaw 1989, ISBN 83-06-01606-8 , (Biblioteka Syrenki) .
Web links
- Literature by and about Juliusz Bursche in the catalog of the German National Library
- About Juliusz Bursche on the website of the Evangelical-Augsburg Church in Poland
Individual evidence
- ↑ Andreas Kossert : Masuria - East Prussia's forgotten south . Pantheon, 2006, ISBN 3-570-55006-0 , pp. 209 ff .
- ↑ Fate of the persecuted bishop boy clarified. Süddeutsche Zeitung , October 27, 2017, accessed on August 26, 2020 . .
- ^ A late reunion after a generation , in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , November 26, 2018, p. 13.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Boy, Juliusz |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Polish evangelical clergyman, publisher and regional bishop of Poland |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 16, 1862 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Kalisz , Poland |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 20, 1942 |
| Place of death | Moabit Prison , Berlin |