Easter message from Munich laypeople

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Easter message from Munich laypeople was a memorandum of the resistance group around the Protestant bookseller and publisher Albert Lempp , later known as the " Lempp Circle". It dates from April 25, 1943 , the latest possible date for Easter, and is one of the few testimonies of church resistance to the National Socialist persecution of Jews .

The author was the Württemberg pastor Hermann Diem , who belonged to the circle around Albert Lempp.

Summary

The memorandum begins with the complaint that “ Christians could no longer bear it”, that “the Church is silent about the persecution of the Jews”. The persecution of the Jews is rejected with reference to the Christian commandment to love one's neighbor and to the parable of the good Samaritan .

Furthermore, the “ Jewish question ” is not seen as a political but as an “evangelical” problem. Annihilation of Judaism is seen as an attempt to fight the God of the First Commandment . The Jews, it is further said, are the people of God and the church is inextricably linked with Judaism .

It is important that the church bear witness against the persecution of the Jews and other "men and women in the German sphere of influence" who are "subjected to without a judicial judgment" and remind the state to "do no violence to foreigners, widows and orphans " . The case law also has to be guided by this commandment in terms of punishment and the execution of sentences.

He also mentions the “measures in the occupied territories” which “ severely burdened the conscience and strength of countless men and women in the German people”.

The Church's testimony against the persecution of the Jews must be public; everything that the church had done in this matter up to now was not such a testimony because it did not happen publicly or did justice to the task.

The document "represents the most decisive and clearest commitment against the persecution of the Jews that has ever been made in Bavaria" (Helmut Baier, church historian, head of the regional church archive in Nuremberg from 1975 to 2004).

consequences

This Easter message was handed over to regional bishop Hans Meiser as a memorandum of the Lempp circle in April 1943 , but was not published or preached in the churches. However, it was passed on to the Württemberg regional bishop Theophil Wurm . In the period that followed, the memorandum was reprinted and distributed more widely, including in Switzerland.

Only the Rhenish pastor Helmut Hesse read the document publicly, but paid for it with his life. He was arrested by the Gestapo on June 8, 1943 and sent to the Dachau concentration camp on November 13 . He died eleven days later because he was deprived of essential medicines and treatments.

swell