Laurentius Siemer

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Laurentius M. Siemer OP (* March 8, 1888 in Elisabethfehn ; † October 21, 1956 in Cologne ) was Provincial of the Dominicans and part of the resistance against National Socialism .

Life

Laurentius Siemer was the sixth of ten children of Elisabethfehner's canal builder Franz Joseph Siemer and his wife Maria Josephine Franziska, née. Diekhaus was born and baptized Joseph Franz Bernhard on March 10, 1888 . After graduating from high school in 1908, he entered the Dominican Order on May 25, 1908 and took the name Laurentius . He then studied philosophy and theology from 1909 to 1916 at the University of the Dominican Order in Düsseldorf .

On 4 August 1914 he received by the Cologne Archbishop Felix von Hartmann the priesthood and completed during the First World War the military service as a medic in a military hospital in Düsseldorf Dominican monastery . From 1918 he studied classical philology and history in Münster and passed his state examination in religion, philosophy, German and history at the end of 1920. On March 10, 1921 he became rector of the grammar school with boarding school of the Dominicans in Vechta , today's St. Thomas College in Füchtel. Laurentius Siemer was elected Provincial of the German Order Province of the Dominicans (Teutonia) on September 13, 1932 ; his term of office lasted, with multiple re-elections, until 1946.

From the beginning, Siemer uncompromisingly opposed National Socialism . In the Easter edition of the Germania center newspaper he openly criticized the Nazis' racial ideology; in a later editorial in this newspaper he described the equation of race and religion as "degeneration" and urged Catholics not to allow themselves to be influenced by current intellectual currents.

On April 9, 1935, Siemer was arrested by the Gestapo for alleged "currency offenses" and spent several months in prison in Oldenburg . After his conviction by the Oldenburg Schöffengericht in the course of the foreign exchange processes , Siemer appealed and was acquitted on January 31, 1936; the Oldenburg Higher Regional Court confirmed this acquittal on December 21, 1936 after an appeal hearing. His co-defendants Thomas Stuhlweissenburg and Titus Horten did not survive the trial, however, Father Stuhlweissenburg committed suicide in deep despair on October 3, 1935, and Father Horten died on January 25, 1936 as a result of the inhumane imprisonment.

After his release, Laurentius Siemer traveled to Rome in early 1937 and, through the mediation of Cardinal Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli - later Pope Pius XII. - by Pope Pius XI. received in private audience. From January to May 1937 Laurentius Siemer undertook a missionary trip that took him back to Germany from Genoa via Sri Lanka, China, Manila, Japan, Honolulu and San Francisco.

From 1941, Siemer actively supported resistance groups against National Socialism and made the Walberberg Monastery available for conspiratorial meetings. Siemer became a member of the Cologne Circle . He declared it to be an obligation "to do everything possible so that National Socialism would be destroyed". He postulated the "ruthless and consistent participation in the conspiracy against the Nazi state".

Siemer was close friends with Josef Wirmer , who was supposed to be Minister of Justice after the fall of Hitler. In 1942, Siemer worked for Carl Goerdeler , with whom he met frequently, a draft on the future relationship between state and church in Germany.

After the unsuccessful assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944, Siemer was able to escape his captors under adventurous circumstances and hide in his homeland until the end of the war. First the Kurre family took him in Schwichteler , then he was hidden from September 1944 until the invasion of the Allied troops in April 1945 with the Trumme family in Handorf near Holdorf . His profile read:

“Look for the Provincial of the Dominican Order Josef Siemer, called Father Laurentius, who played a leading role in the preparation of the assassination attempt on the Führer on July 20, 1944. He managed to escape immediately before the arrest. "

Together with his brother Eberhard Welty, Siemer published the magazine Die Neueordnung from 1946 and tried in vain, like Jakob Kaiser , Walter Dirks and others, to exert a decisive influence on the program of the new Christian party so that Christianity and socialism would be reconciled . He had a decisive influence on the first party program, which was published on July 1, 1945 as the “Preliminary Draft for a Program for Christian Democrats in Germany” and later became known as the Cologne Guidelines . As a name for the new party, later known as the CDU , he suggested “Christian Socialist Union”. In the British occupation zone , Siemer and Welty prepared the Ahlen program of 1947, which, however , could not prevail within the CDU against the economic policy strategy of the social market economy , largely driven by Konrad Adenauer .

Siemer rarely spoke of his activity in the resistance against Hitler; Since he saw himself as a representative of a supranational power, he took resistance against Hitler for granted.

After working as Provincial of the Dominicans, Siemer was co-founder and general secretary (until 1951) of the Catholic Academic Work in Germany . In South Oldenburg he campaigned for the expansion of the reopened religious school in Vechta and, from 1957, developed an intensive pastoral activity from Cologne that went beyond the confessional boundaries.

From 1950 on, Siemer became known through numerous radio lectures and televised speeches, which were also published as a book (“So are we people”). On October 21, 1956, Siemer suddenly died of heart failure, for 1957 he had been chosen by the Aachen Carnival Society as a knight of the order against the seriousness of the animal .

Siemer is one of the most important figures of German Catholicism of his time. He received a large Federal Cross of Merit and honorary memberships of various Catholic associations in the KV , CV and UV . The Laurentius-Siemer-Gymnasium in Ramsloh , Saterland is named after him.

Works

  • How I experienced the Far East. Travel memories.
  • This is how we humans are (1957)
  • Notes and letters (1958) Frankfurt / M.

literature

  • Rudolf Uertz: Christianity and Socialism in the Early CDU. Foundations and effects of Christian-social ideas in the Union 1945–1949. Stuttgart 1981.
  • Wolfgang Ockenfels : Contemporary history in life pictures. Volume V. Mainz 1982, pp. 147-160.
  • Siemer, Joseph. In: Hans Friedl u. a. (Ed.): Biographical manual for the history of the state of Oldenburg . Edited on behalf of the Oldenburg landscape. Isensee, Oldenburg 1992, ISBN 3-89442-135-5 , p. 673 ff. ( PDF ).
  • Vera Bücker: The Cologne Circle and its conception for a Germany after Hitler. In: Historisch-Politik Mitteilungen 2 (1995) p. 49 ff.
  • Antonia Leugers : Against a wall of episcopal silence. The Committee on Religious Affairs and its Resistance Concept 1941–1945. Frankfurt am Main 1996.
  • Rainer Maria Groothuis: In the service of a supranational power - The German Dominicans under the Nazi dictatorship. Regensberg, Münster 2002, ISBN 3-7923-0754-5 , pp. 301–316 and 361–405.
  • Michael Hirschfeld, Anna Maria Zumholz: Oldenburg's priests under Nazi terror 1932–1945. Everyday rulership in milieu and diaspora. Aschendorff-Verlag, Münster 2006, ISBN 3-402-02492-6 , pp. 572-591.
  • Wolfgang Ockenfels: The high C: Where is the CDU heading? Sankt Ulrich Verlag, Augsburg 2009, especially p. 49 ff.
  • Elias H. Füllenbach : On the history of the order in the 19th and 20th centuries. In: More than black and white. 800 years of the Dominican Order. Pustet, Regensburg 2016, pp. 147–165.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Laurentius Siemer - a short biography. In: Moor- und Fehnmuseum Elisabethfehn (ed.): Pater Laurentius M. Siemer OP Special exhibition on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his death. Rhauderfehn 2006, p. 4ff.
  2. ↑ Stefan Noethen: Plans for the Fourth Reich. The resistance group in Cologne's Kettelerhaus 1941–1944. In: History in Cologne. Issue 39, July 1996, ISSN  0720-3659 , pp. 51-73, here p. 51.
  3. ↑ Wolfgang Ockenfels: Contemporary history in life pictures. Volume V. Mainz 1982, pp. 147-160
personal data
SURNAME Siemer, Laurentius
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Siemer, Joseph Franz Bernhard (original name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Dominican
DATE OF BIRTH March 8, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Elisabethfehn
DATE OF DEATH October 21, 1956
Place of death Cologne