Walther Disselnkötter

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Walther Emil Karl Disselnkötter (born November 14, 1903 in Traben-Trarbach ; † March 20, 2000 in Kassel ) was a German Protestant pastor . He was honored as Righteous Among the Nations .

Live and act

Disselnkötter was born in Traben-Trarbach in 1903 as the son of a grammar school teacher and local researcher Heinrich Disselnkötter. After graduating from high school in 1922, he began studying in Marburg , interrupted it from August 1923 to March 1924 and worked at Deutsche Bank and resumed it in Berlin . Later he interrupted it again and worked as a private tutor in Regensburg , then he studied in Tübingen and Bonn and graduated in October 1926 in Koblenz . He then worked as a vicar in Cologne and Wied, passed the second exam in 1930 and was ordained . In 1930 he married his wife Anna Disselnkötter . They had four children together. He had his first pastor's position in a Protestant community from 1930 to 1937 in Sensweiler near Idar-Oberstein . At the urging of the church leadership, Disselnkötter was transferred in 1937 and worked in Züschen until the end of World War II . Shortly after the National Socialists came to power , the Disselnkötter couple joined the Confessing Church . The couple experienced the Reichspogromnacht in Züschen. As it looting came in a Jewish grocery store, tried to intervene Disselnkötters unsuccessful. The two also tried to stand up for their Jewish fellow citizens in other ways. From January 1945 until the liberation on Good Friday 1945, they hid the Jew Rahel Ida Plüer in their house . This was risky for Disselnkötters because, as a member of the Confessing Church, the Gestapo had already classified him as politically unreliable. Disselnkötter reported afterwards about the liberation: Since the invasion of the Americans we no longer had to fear that the Jew would be discovered [...] [no more fear of being denounced for some 'anti-state' statement! So take a deep breath? Yes, but at the same time a deep anxiety about the future ...

In 1946 he changed his pastor again and came to Bad Wildungen , where he stayed until he retired in 1971. In 2000 he died in the company of his wife and daughter in Kassel.

Honor

  • Memorial plaque on the former rectory in Züschen
  • 1996: Award of the State of Israel as Righteous Among the Nations, for the rescue of Rahel Ida Plüer, nee Schild

literature

  • Thomas Schattner: The pastor couple hides a Jewish woman in the parsonage . In: Circular Letter No. 37. Ed .: Association for the Promotion of the Memorial and the Breitenau Archive e. V .. Kassel. March 2018. p. 80 ( available online (PDF))
  • Israel Gutman , Daniel Fraenkel, Jackob Borut (ed.): Lexicon of the Righteous Among the Nations - Germans and Austrians . Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag . 2005. ISBN 3-89244-900-7 . P. 97f. ( available on Google Books )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Paul Gerhard Lohmann: The anti-Jewish racial fanaticism of Hitler, Jews in Fritzlar and its districts and their few friends: Extended Edition . BoD - Books on Demand, 2014, ISBN 978-3-7357-1164-9 , pp. 329 ( google.de [accessed June 5, 2020]).


personal data
SURNAME Disselnkötter, Walther
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Disselnkötter, Walther Emil Karl (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German pastor and holder of the Righteous Among the Nations award
DATE OF BIRTH November 14, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Traben-Trarbach
DATE OF DEATH March 20, 2000
Place of death kassel