Karl Kunkel

Karl Kunkel (born November 8, 1913 in Seeburg / East Prussia ; † January 30, 2012 in Bensheim ) was a German Roman Catholic priest . Since he was suspected of having had contacts with "hostile foreign countries" during the National Socialist era , he was interned as a " special prisoner " in the Ravensbrück and Dachau concentration camps.

Life

Karl Kunkel comes from a Catholic host family in East Prussia. After high school he studied at the Lyceum Hosianum later at the Universities of Tübingen and Munich theology . On March 6, 1938, he received by the Bishop of Warmia , Maximilian Kaller , the ordination . Then he was chaplain in Allenstein until 1942 , where he devoted himself particularly to youth work. He then took up a position as a chaplain in Königsberg and was a part-time pastor there . In this function he was also responsible for pastoral care of the wounded and the soldiers imprisoned there in Königsberg. His duties included providing spiritual support to the military members who were sentenced to death during numerous executions.

Already in his time as a youth minister, in which Karl Kunkel had tried to disguise the group lessons of his parishioners as "Bible lessons" - illegal from the perspective of the National Socialists - and because in his sermons he had shown connections between the "Hitler movement and atheism", the young chaplain had been summoned and warned repeatedly by the Gestapo . At the beginning of 1944 the Gestapo became aware of him again because a former student colleague had referred to him as a "man with international contacts" during an interrogation. He was suspected of having secret links with opponents of the regime abroad. On July 15, 1944, Kunkel was arrested and taken to the Ravensbrück concentration camp for questioning. When the Gestapo could not discover any suspicious machinations despite the mistreatment, Karl Kunkel remained imprisoned in Ravensbrück as a "special prisoner". As the front drew nearer, he was transferred to the Dachau concentration camp on February 23, 1945. Although he was not a high church dignitary as a chaplain, he was not housed there like the other priests in the pastor's block of the prisoner camp, but in the department for special spiritual prisoners of the camp prison (bunker). He was interned in this separate cell wing with the French bishop of Clermont-Ferrand , Gabriel Piguet , the Munich cathedral capitular Johannes Neuhäusler , the editor of the Munich Catholic Church newspaper , Prelate Michael Höck , and the prominent Protestant pastor of the regime, Pastor Martin Niemöller . On the evening of April 24th, 1945 Karl Kunkel was with the other special prisoners from the SS picked -Sonderkommando from the Dachau concentration camp and in a roundabout way in the Dolomites in South Tyrol brought. There he and his fellow prisoners were liberated by the American army on May 4, 1945 .

In July 1945 Karl Kunkel took on a new pastoral role as a spiritual director in the Dominican Sisters' mission monastery in Schlehdorf, Upper Bavaria . Since he could not return to his East Prussian home diocese at that time, he worked in the diocese of Mainz from 1950 . He was the first rector of the reopened Episcopal Konvikt in Bensheim . In 1956 he became pastor of the Maria Hilf parish in Mainz-Kostheim , where he worked until his retirement in 1979.

Even after his retirement, Karl Kunkel continued to work, he worked in the pastoral care team of a parish in Bensheim and remained the pastor of the Maria Ward sisters . As one of the few surviving former concentration camp inmates, he also performed important tasks as a contemporary witness .

In recognition of his many years of pastoral work, Pastor Kunkel was given the honorary title of “ Spiritual Counselor ” by his bishop . In March 2003 he celebrated his Iron, and in 2008 his 70th anniversary as a priest.

Web links

• Karl Kunkel at www.gedenkstaettenpaedagogik-bayern.de

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Karl-Josef Bänker: On the death of clergyman Karl Kunkel - He was a priest with heart and soul. In: Bergsträßer Anzeiger from February 1, 2012, accessed on March 21, 2020.