Morality trials against religious and priests under National Socialism

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The moral trials against members of the religious order and priests under National Socialism from May 26, 1936 in Koblenz are assigned to the National Socialist persecution practice in the German Reich and are sometimes referred to as "monastery trials". What is meant by this is the legal and propagandistic persecution of allegedly homosexual Catholic priests and friars under the charge of "fornication between men" and "fornication with pupils".

prehistory

In April 1935, the investigation began at the institutions of the Franciscan Brothers of the Holy Cross in Waldbreitbach . The Waldbreitbacher Brothers formed a lay congregation that looked after the mentally weak and sick men and maintained institutions for welfare children, hospitals and outpatient nursing. In this context, after a criminal complaint for offenses under Section 175 , “fornication between men” was determined.

In addition to the public prosecutor's office, the Gestapo also intervened in the proceedings with a special command . Although legally only with the status of "auxiliary officers of the public prosecutor's office", the Sonderkommando was far superior to the public prosecutor's office in terms of personnel and material. Its claim to competence manifested the Gestapo with a special department for the subject area homosexuality in the Official Political Police , which was responsible Sonderdezernat homosexuality .

The investigations were extended to other congregations in the autumn of 1935 in the course of the so-called "foreign exchange trials", when courts punished illegal money transfers from religious orders abroad . As a result, the law enforcement authorities took action against the secular clergy with Section 175, which was tightened in June 1935 . In addition, the prosecution was partly carried out in accordance with § 174 , fornication with pupils, or charges were brought, since the victims z. B. fosterlings or pupils were in homes.

Processes

The proceedings were heard at the Bonn and Koblenz regional courts. The start of a series of 35 trial days was the main trial against the Waldbreitbacher Father Leovigild before the Koblenz Regional Court on May 26, 1936. The trials were interrupted during the Olympic Games in Berlin in August 1936, but then resumed. By the end of 1937, the special public prosecutor's office in Koblenz alone had around 2,500 investigations pending or concluded. Much of it was dealt with in the preliminary proceedings “for lack of evidence, because of insignificance, statute of limitations or a six-month amnesty from August 1934” . A few legally unclear cases were only closed years later. In July 1937 the series of trials was canceled. The reason for this was probably that Hitler needed a calm domestic policy for foreign policy plans at the time, because the press campaign promoted by Joseph Goebbels also ended at the end of July.

In total, around 250 criminal proceedings were opened out of around 2,500 preliminary investigations, 40 of which ended with an acquittal and suspensions. 64 confessing priests and 170 members of the order were mostly punished with imprisonment between one and two years. The proceedings were not conducted before the special courts of the National Socialists, but rather before the ordinary regional courts. According to Hockerts, the judgments of the regional courts based on §§ 174 and 175 seem to be "consistently legally justifiable". In the pastoral letter of the Fulda Bishops' Assembly of August 1936, "the German episcopate officially and publicly made it clear that the church would not raise any objection to the Koblenz trials," but at the same time the Nazi propaganda , which was generally directed against the Catholic Church, was rejected.

According to Hockerts, the high number of convicts came about "through an unusual accumulation of homosexual offenses in a few lay congregations" (in detail: 54 Waldbreitbacher Brothers, 46 Cologne Alexians , 22 Merciful Brothers from Montabaur , 16 Neuss Alexians , 12 Merciful Brothers ). The convicted perpetrators were usually punished according to canon law . The church excluded 31 brothers from the Waldbreitbach community; the community was dissolved in 1937 at the instigation of the bishop of Trier.

Some convicts were taken into protective custody by the Gestapo after they had served their sentences, the accused after their release from pre-trial detention and were taken to the concentration camps.

In the encyclical With Burning Concern of March 1937, Pope Pius XI condemned the "deviations between faith and life" of individual members of the church, but at the same time protested against the one-sided Nazi propaganda on the occasion of the moral trials.

Nazi propaganda

The actions of the Gestapo involved in the investigation and the trials themselves were accompanied by the Nazi press as propaganda and presented to the public in a detailed, defamatory and generalized manner. For example, the SS leader and Düsseldorf police chief Fritz Weitzel published a comprehensive collection of various inflammatory articles from the Rheinische Landeszeitung about religious of the Jesuits, Pallottines, Franciscans and others who were denounced for homosexuality, currency crimes, distribution of "Marxist propaganda", moral offenses, high treason and more . The book was titled You shall recognize them by their deeds! , an allusion to the biblical phrase "You shall recognize them by their fruits" ( Mt 7,16,20  EU ).

The climax of Nazi propaganda was reached on May 28, 1937, when Joseph Goebbels' speech in Berlin's Deutschlandhalle was broadcast by all radio stations and appeared in all newspapers of the German Reich on the following day under the heading “Last Warning!”. According to the Propaganda Minister, thousands of secular clerics and religious should have carried out "the planned moral extermination of thousands of children and the sick". Goebbels described the clergy as "senior and unscrupulous youth molesters" and demanded that "this sexual plague must be eradicated with stump and handle". He was delighted and grateful that Hitler “as the appointed protector of German youth was proceeding with iron severity against the corrupters and poisoners of our people's soul”.
As a consequence of this alleged “blatant episcopal irresponsibility”, Goebbels denied the Roman Catholic Church the right to criticize the Nazi regime and to participate in the education of young people.

He also named two essential political goals of the National Socialist morality processes. The propaganda was intended to discredit the Catholic Church itself and to portray clerics and religious in general as "immoral" and "corrupters of youth". Another long-term goal of the National Socialists was to dissolve the denominational schools guaranteed in the Reich Concordat of 1933 or to abolish the general participation of clergy and religious in education and schooling.

literature

  • Hans Günter Hockerts : The morality processes against Catholic religious and priests 1936-1937. A study on the National Socialist rule technique and the church struggle . Matthias Grünewald Verlag, Mainz 1971, ISBN 3-7867-0312-4 . ( ub.uni-muenchen.de )
  • Günter Grau (Ed.): Homosexuality in the Nazi era. Documents of discrimination and persecution . Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-596-11254-0 . Revised new edition 2004, ISBN 3-596-15973-3 .
  • Karl-Joseph Hummel : German History 1933–1945. Munich 1998, ISBN 3-7892-9314-8 .
  • Hans Mommsen : National Socialism as a secular religion . In: Gerhard Besier (ed.): Between “national revolution” and military aggression. Transformations in Church and Society 1934–1939 . Oldenbourg, Munich 2001.
  • Swamp and custom . In: Der Spiegel . No. 42 , 1971 ( online report of Hockerts study).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hans Günter Hockerts, 1971, p. 50.
  2. ↑ Hans Günter Hockerts, 1971, p. 4.
  3. ↑ Hans Günter Hockerts, 1971, p. 7 f.
  4. ↑ Hans Günter Hockerts, 1971, p. 11.
  5. ^ Günter Grau, Rüdiger Lautmann: Lexicon on Homosexual Persecution 1933–1945: Institutions - Competencies - Fields of Activity . LIT Verlag, Münster 2011, ISBN 978-3-8258-9785-7 . P. 276.
  6. ↑ Hans Günter Hockerts, 1971, p. 40.
  7. ↑ Hans Günter Hockerts, 1971, p. 48.
  8. ^ Gerhard Krause, Gerhard Müller (ed.): Theologische Realenzyklopädie . Verlag Walter de Gruyter, ISBN 3-11-002218-4 , p. 63, 2000.
  9. ^ Norbert Frei / Johannes Schmitz: Journalism in the Third Reich . CH Beck, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-406-33131-9 , pp. 65 .
  10. ↑ a b Hans Günter Hockerts, 1971, p. 48 ff.
  11. ↑ Hans Günter Hockerts, 1971, p. 58.
  12. ↑ Hans Günter Hockerts, 1971, p. 58.
  13. ↑ Hans Günter Hockerts, 1971, p. 162.
  14. ↑ Hans Günter Hockerts, 1971, p. 50.
  15. ↑ Hans Günter Hockerts, 1971, p. 53.
  16. ↑ Hans Günter Hockerts, 1971, p. 31.
  17. ↑ Hans Günter Hockerts, 1971, p. 163.
  18. ↑ quoted from: Hans Günter Hockerts, 1971, p. 114.
  19. ^ Völkischer Beobachter , May 30, 1937; quoted after Ralf Georg Reuth (Ed.): Joseph Goebbels. The diaries . Volume 3: 1935-1939 . Piper, Munich / Zurich 1992, pp. 1083 f., Note 73.
  20. ↑ Hans Günter Hockerts, 1971, p. 115.
  21. ↑ Hans Mommsen : National Socialism as a Secular Religion , 2001, p. 48.