Otto Henneberger

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Otto Henneberger (born October 25, 1892 in Herpf ; † June 6, 1981 in Braunschweig ) was a German Protestant pastor and a church councilor since 1942 .

Life

Henneberger passed the Abitur in Meiningen and studied theology from 1911 at the universities of Heidelberg , Leipzig , Berlin and Jena . After his military service he became vicar and pastor in Thuringia. Between 1924 and 1934 he held the people's missionary and apologetic office of the Thuringian Evangelical Church .

The so-called seizure of power in 1933 also led to a redistribution of influence over the church leadership. In 1933, the Nazi-oriented German Christians also took over the parish of St. Pauli in Braunschweig . The Jena pastor Otto Henneberger was elected pastor by the church council at the end of 1933 and took up his pastoral office on February 1, 1934. He expressed himself in many publications on questions of religion and the state. The theologian Dietrich Kuessner described Henneberger's position on this as follows:

“Henneberger referred to Hitler's government declaration of March 1933, in which Hitler actually described the two Christian churches as pillars of his future policy. The ambiguous concept of positive Christianity came from the National Socialist party program and was interpreted by the well-intentioned in such a way that the NSDAP, in contrast to the KPD and SPD, saw itself as a Christian party. Henneberger interpreted the party paragraph from positive Christianity as Lutheran Christianity. The National Socialist state with the party program of positive Christianity was therefore the ideal partner for the evangelical church in order to gain a hearing for the word of God and the national church among the people. The office of the people's church, on the other hand, would be to be the cathedral of the nation. In this cathedral of the nation, Luther and Hitler, the Lutheran creed and National Socialist politics were both separate and yet, depending on the occasion, sometimes more closely, sometimes more distantly related. In relation to National Socialism, the church had a pedagogical task, namely to protect the National Socialist state from the temptation of churchhood or a substitute for religion, as the German Faith Movement claimed.

That was Henneberger's model of thought, presented in many variations and other popular writings for the hand of the community. The double faced of extraordinary closeness to the National Socialist system and state and the polemical distance to the German Faith Movement and the National Socialist party group toying with it gave Henneberger's position its typical character, which changes from case to case depending on the occasion. This also explains why Henneberger never unmistakably distanced himself from this work after the war. In the year of publication 1934, this writing characterized Henneberger as a moderate German Christian and gave him a stable position on the church council, although in contrast to P. Schwarze he was not a member of the NSDAP. "

From 1934 to 1966 he was pastor at the St. Pauli Church in Braunschweig, where he also worked after his retirement. Since 1938 he was chairman of the Braunschweig regional association of the Evangelical Federation .

Works (selection)

  • Church and Freethinking. On the will of free thinking and the meaning of the church. Wichern-Verlag, Berlin-Spandau 1931.
  • God's way to the Germans. Foundation publishing house, Potsdam 1936.
  • Fighting people and believing community. Verlag des Evangelischen Bund, Berlin 1940.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jürgens, Braunschweigisches Biographisches Lexikon.
  2. ^ Kuessner: The German Christians conquer the Pauli church council.
  3. ↑ Kuessner: History of Pauli community [...].
  4. ↑ Heinz Boberach , Carsten Nicolaisen , Ruth Pabst (editor): Handbook of the German Protestant Churches 1918 to 1949. Organs - Offices - Associations - Persons. Volume 1: Nationwide institutions, p. 443. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2010, ISBN 978-3-525-55784-6 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
personal data
SURNAME Henneberger, Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Protestant pastor and councilor
DATE OF BIRTH October 25, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Herpf
DATE OF DEATH June 6, 1981
Place of death Braunschweig