Martin Sasse (Bishop)

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Martin Sasse (born August 15, 1890 in Groß Drenzig near Guben ; † August 28, 1942 in Eisenach ) was a German regional bishop and National Socialist .

Life

Sasse studied Protestant theology from 1911 to 1914 in Tübingen , Halle (Saale) , Berlin and Jena . He was a soldier in the First World War .

On October 2, 1921, Sasse was ordained pastor and was pastor in Heber / CSR until 1922. From 1923 to 1930 he served as pastor in Rothenburg / Oberlausitz and from 1930 to 1933 as pastor in Lauscha, Thuringia .

Sasse became a member of the SA and the NSDAP and was a leading member of the church movement German Christians . In 1933 he was a member of the 3rd and 4th Landeskirchentag and initially part-time, later full-time member of the regional church council . In 1934 he was appointed regional bishop of the Thuringian Evangelical Church .

Act

As an avowed anti-Semite and leading head of the German Christians, Sasse actively influenced the personal and structural orientation of his church and its submission to the ideology and practice of the National Socialist state , operated the "de-Judaization" of the Thuringian Church, suppressed the adherents of the Confessing Church and worked with the Gestapo . Within the German Christians, after their division into various organizations, Sasse was one of the protagonists of the church movement DC “Thuringian Direction”, the most radical movement. In 1939 he was one of the founders of the Eisenach Institute for the research and elimination of Jewish influence on German church life . He also attacked "world Catholicism". He died of a stroke in 1942 .

At the end of 1938 Sasse announced under the title Martin Luther and the Jews: Away with them! Excerpts from Martin Luther's anti-Jewish book On the Jews and their Lies (1543). In the foreword he declared himself a supporter of the November pogroms :

“On November 10, 1938, on Luther's birthday, synagogues burned in Germany. The German people finally break the power of the Jews in the economic field in the new Germany in atonement for the murder of the delegation council vom Rath by the hands of the Jews and thus crown the divine struggle of the Führer for the complete liberation of our people. ... At this hour the voice of the man must be heard who, as the German prophet in the 16th century, began as a friend of the Jews out of ignorance, who, driven by his conscience, driven by experience and reality, was the greatest anti-Semite of his time has become the warner of his people against the Jews. "

Works

  • Preface , in: The Struggle for Authority of the Church. A dispute between the regional church council of the Thuringian Protestant Church and the confessional front , Jena: Diederichs 1935.
  • (as ed.) Martin Luther on the Jews: Away with them! , Freiburg: Sturmhut-Verlag 1938 (English and Dutch translations 1939)

literature

  • Erich Stegmann: The church struggle in the Thuringian Evangelical Church 1933–1945 ; Berlin 1984.
  • Thomas A. Seidel (ed.): Thuringian ridge walks. Contributions to the 75-year history of the Protestant regional church of Thuringia (= hostels of Christianity. Yearbook for German Church History, special volume 3), Leipzig 1998; ISBN 3-374-01699-5

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , p. 519.
  2. ^ Olaf Blaschke : The 'Reichspogromnacht' and the attitude of the Catholic population and the church. History of mentality as the key to a new understanding? In: House of History Baden-Württemberg (ed.): Side by side - With each other - Against each other? On the coexistence of Jews and Catholics in southern Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries. (Laupheim Talks 2000) Bleicher, Gerlingen 2002, p. 205
  3. ^ Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Fischer Taschenbuch 2005, p. 519.
  4. ↑ http://hpd.de/node/13538?page=0,1 ; see also Raphael Gross : November 1938. The catastrophe before the catastrophe . Beck, Munich 2013, p. 79.
personal data
SURNAME Sasse, Martin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German regional bishop
DATE OF BIRTH August 15, 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH Great Drenzig near Guben
DATE OF DEATH August 28, 1942
Place of death Eisenach