Kurt Mathias von Leers
Kurt Mathias von Leers (born July 22, 1912 in Geudertheim ; † August 3, 1945 in Todtmoos ) was a German Roman Catholic theology student and candidate for the priesthood of the Osnabrück diocese , who died as a result of his imprisonment in a concentration camp and is therefore considered a martyr .
Life
Kurt Mathias von Leers came from the 1791 in the Empire nobility collected original merchant and later Mecklenburg landowner family Leers . He was the youngest son of Kurt (Alfred August Constantin Leopold Heino) von Leers from the Schönfeld family (born August 12, 1871 in Demmin; † 1917) and his wife Elisabeth Ida Auguste, née. von Buch (born September 3, 1877 in Strehlen (Dresden) ; † 1940). The National Socialist journalist Johann von Leers was his oldest brother.
After the early death of his father in World War I , he grew up with relatives on the Schimm estate . Already as a youth devoted to the Catholic Church, he converted on August 22, 1930 in Rostock . He initially works as a private language teacher and volunteer in Catholic youth work. For a while he was prefect of the Catholic youth in the dean's office in Mecklenburg, which at that time belonged to the diocese of Osnabrück.
In 1938 he began studying theology with the aim of becoming a priest in the Diocese of Osnabrück, initially at the University of Münster , and from 1939 at the Jesuit Philosophical-Theological University of Sankt Georgen in Frankfurt am Main .
In November 1942 he was arrested with the Jesuit father Kurt Dehen and the alumnus Mainulf von Mallinckrodt and taken to the Frankfurt Gestapo prison on suspicion of being a Jesuit and of having made speeches against the state. Under torture, the Gestapo tried to get von Leers to testify against the leadership of St. Georgen, but it did not succeed. Weakened by the interrogations, he developed tuberculosis . On February 19, 1943, he was transferred to the Dachau concentration camp . His brother Johann von Leers tried to help him to be released on condition that he renounced the Catholic Church, which Kurt von Leers refused. He was released from prison in August 1943, but had to be treated in the camp hospital until October 1943.
Bishop Hermann Wilhelm Berning had von Leers taken to a sanatorium in Todtmoos, where his condition worsened again after a short improvement, so that he died here in August 1945 without having achieved his goal of becoming a priest.
Because he had come because of his advocacy of faith in Gestapo and concentration camp and died of the consequences, he is in the Catholic Church as a martyr and was established in 1999 in the behalf of the German Bishops' Conference created German martyrology of the 20th century recorded.
literature
- Renate Krüger, Art .: Kurt Mathias Von Leers , in: Helmut Moll (Ed. On behalf of the German Bishops' Conference): Witnesses for Christ. The German Martyrology of the 20th Century , Paderborn et al. 1999, 7th revised and updated edition 2019, ISBN 978-3-506-78012-6 , Volume 1, pp. 333f.
Individual evidence
- ↑ So in witnesses for Christ ; in the list of Leer's descendants (PDF; 181 kB), however, Matthias
- ↑ In Witnesses for Christ wrongly Gendertheim
- ↑ Presumably today's Wehrawaldklinik
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Leers, Kurt Mathias von |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Leers, Kurt Matthias von |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German Roman Catholic theology student and candidate for the priesthood of the Diocese of Osnabrück |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 22, 1912 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Geudertheim |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 3, 1945 |
| Place of death | Dead moss |