70 years ago on this date, October
12, 1944, German Resistance Member, Father Otto Muller, died in the Berlin
Police Hospital. Let us not forget him as one of the German Resistance against
Nazism. We will post information about him from Wikipedia.
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| Otto Müller |
Fr. Otto Müller (eng: Otto
Mueller) (1870-1944) was a German Roman Catholic priest, active in the
Christian Worker's movement and the German Resistance against Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime. Implicated in
the July Plot, Müller died in custody in 1944.
Biography
Müller was ordained as a Catholic
priest in 1894. He became active in supporting the development of a Christian
workers’ movement and in 1918, became president of the West German Federation
of the Catholic Workers’ Movement. From 1919 to 1933 he served as a Catholic Centre Party delegate on the
municipal councils in Mönchengladbach and Cologne.
Following the Nazi takeover, the
Catholic Church in Germany sought an accord with the new Government and signed
the Reich concordat in effort to safeguard Church autonomy. Müller was
initially convinced that the Concordat would protect Catholic Church’s
activities, but soon began to oppose the bishops’ submissive policy toward the
Nazi regime. He called on the Church to take up a clear position against the
legal violations of the Nazis. Müller had been in contact with the military
opposition before the beginning of World War Two, and later allowed Resistance
figures to use the Ketteler-Haus in Cologne for discussions.
Since 1927, Fr. Müller was involved in
the resistance against National Socialism. He involved himself in planning the
reorganisation of post-Nazi Germany with leading Resistance figures like the
Christian trade unionists Jakob Kaiser, Bernhard Letterhaus and the Blessed Nikolaus
Gross, in whom the Catholic religion had motivated a determination to
resist. On 20 July 1944, the Operation Valkyrie attempt was made to
assassinate Adolf Hitler, inside his Wolf's
Lair field headquarters in East
Prussia. The plot was the culmination of the efforts of several groups in
the German Resistance to overthrow the Nazi government. The failure of both the
assassination and the military coup d'état which was planned to follow
it led to the arrest of at least 7,000 people by the Gestapo. The
Gestapo arrested the Cologne conspirators. Müller, seriously ill, was
imprisoned in the Berlin Police Hospital. There he died on 12 October 1944.
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