Leo Trouet

Leo (Léon) Trouet (born April 6, 1887 in Malmedy ; † November 2-3 , 1944 in Cologne ) was a lawyer and notary . He became a victim of the Nazi regime .

resume

The son of a leather manufacturer attended the Augusta-Victoria-Gymnasium (later Emil-Fischer-Gymnasium) in Euskirchen . There he passed his Abitur in 1907 and studied law, initially in Munich , where he became a member of the K.St.V. Rheno-Bavaria became part of the Cartel Association of Catholic German Student Associations (KV). He later moved to the University of Berlin and joined the K.St.V. Guestphalia at (today K.St.V. Guestphalia-Berlin zu Frankfurt am Main ). Another change of study location led him to the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn . Here he joined the K.St.V. in 1910. Arminia and finished his law degree.

From 1912 trainee lawyer in Cologne, he went to Aachen in 1914 . With the outbreak of the First World War , Trouet interrupted his training as a trainee lawyer and became a soldier. In 1917 he returned to the assessor service in Malmedy, and in 1920 he returned to Aachen.

On the basis of the Versailles Peace Treaty , Trouets became home to Belgian territory on January 10, 1920 . He came to Eupen in 1922 as a court assessor and lawyer and was elected to the first Belgian Eupen city council. His candidacy for mayor of Eupen, proposed by the Catholic party in 1927, was rejected by the Belgian government. In the absence of any other applicant for the post, Trouet took over the business as acting mayor, but had to resign a year later under pressure from the Belgian government. The Belgian interior minister then installed Hugo Zimmermann as a kind of “forced mayor”. Trouet became a notary public in Eupen in the 1930s.

On May 18, 1940, Eupen and Malmedy were annexed by German troops . Shortly before the Allies liberated the city of Eupen on September 11, 1944, the Gestapo had Trouet and other staunch opponents of the Nazi regime arrested. Trouet was taken to the notorious Klingelpütz prison in Cologne . He died "as a result of mistreatment by the Gestapo" on the night of November 2nd to 3rd, 1944. He left behind a wife and three grown children.

Honors

In 1999 the Catholic Church accepted Leo Trouet as a witness of faith in the German martyrology of the 20th century .

literature

• Michael F. Feldkamp : The martyrs of the KV . A handout (series: Verbum Peto. Die kleine Reihe. H. 2), Beckum 1984, p. 13.
• Helmut Moll (publisher on behalf of the German Bishops' Conference), witnesses for Christ. Das Martyrologium des 20. Jahrhundert , Paderborn et al. 1999, 7th revised and updated edition 2019, ISBN 978-3-506-78012-6 ; Volume I., pp. 418-421.

Web links

• Martyr of the Archdiocese of Cologne, Leo Trouet