Let us remember the first martyr of
the Confessing Church during Nazi Germany, Pastor Paul Schneider. As the German
Resistance had inspired the comrades of Unit 1012, let us not forget them and
remember them as heroes who stood against evil.
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Paul Schneider on a German stamp
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Paul Robert Schneider (August 29, 1897 –
July 18, 1939) was an Evangelical Church of the
old-Prussian Union pastor who was the first Protestant minister to be
martyred by the Nazis.
He was murdered with a strophanthin injection at Buchenwald.
INTERNET
SOURCE:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Schneider_(pastor)
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Margarete Dieterich and Paul Schneider
[PHOTO SOURCE: http://leben.us/index.php/component/content/article/46-issue-01-02/123-paul-schneider]
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Early life
Schneider was born in Pferdsfeld,
Germany in 1897, the second of three sons born to Gustav-Adolf Schneider and
Elisabeth Schnorr. He had a strong love for his mother and a great respect for
his father, who was a pastor and an ardent patriot. Following military service
in World War I, Schneider began his theological studies and was ordained in
Hochelheim in 1925. The following year, he married Margarete Dieterich, the
daughter of a pastor. In 1927, the couple had their first son, followed by a
daughter and four more sons.
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Paul Schneider as a student
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Nazi opposition
When President Paul von Hindenburg named Adolf
Hitler Chancellor in 1933, Schneider was the pastor
of the Hochelheim congregation, having succeeded his father who died in 1926.
Initially, Pastor Schneider believed that the new Chancellor, with the help of
divine guidance, would lead Germany into a bright future. It did not take long
for him to perceive the true character of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime.
Schneider did not stand by idly as Nazi leaders ridiculed the morality of the
Church. In writing and in preaching, he protested against the vitriol directed
against the Church by Nazi officials. Pastor Schneider received no backing from
his consistory of the old-Prussian Ecclesiastical Province of the
Rhineland, then seated in Koblenz. On the contrary, in order to placate Nazi officials
who complained about Pastor Schneider, the consistory transferred him to a
remote region of Germany.
Early in 1934, Schneider and his
family moved to Dickenschied, where he became pastor to the Dickenschied
and Womrath congregations. That same year, Pastor Schneider became a member of
the Confessing Church, a Protestant
organization that opposed Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. On one occasion at
the funeral of a Hitler youth boy a Nazi official said in his speech
that the deceased would now be member of the heavenly storm of Horst
Wessel. Pastor Schneider responded that he would not know if a heavenly
storm of Horst Wessel existed but the Lord would bless the boy and take him
into his realm. After this, the Nazi leader came forward and repeated his
words. Pastor Schneider then responded sharply that he would not allow God's
word to be adulterated during a Christian ceremony. As a result he was arrested
for one week in June 1934.
In March 1935, Nazi officials took
Pastor Schneider into “protective custody” (Schutzhaft), a Nazi
euphemism for “arrest” without any judicial warrant. They held him for a few
days because he insisted on reading from the pulpit the synodal criticism of
the government’s policy toward the Church.
Local Nazi officials summoned
Schneider for interrogations twelve times during the winter of 1935/1936. He
continued to speak his mind and follow the dictates of his conscience. Some of
his friends pleaded with him to avoid confrontation with the Nazis. He
responded that he did not seek martyrdom, but that he had to follow his Lord. His primary
responsibility was to prepare his family for eternal life – not to ensure
their material well-being.
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The
Schneider Family
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Arrest and imprisonment
In spring 1937, with the support of
members of his presbytery, Pastor Schneider began the process of
excommunicating parishioners who, because of their allegiance to the Nazi Party,
engaged in conduct which violated congregational discipline. Complaints to Nazi
officials by the censured led to the arrest of Pastor Schneider. Following two
months in the Koblenz prison, officials released him with the warning not to
return to the Rhineland, where his home and parish were located. Pastor
Schneider knew that, if he returned to his flock, it would mean imprisonment in
a concentration camp. Yet, the night before his release,
he read in his Bible the story concerning the crisis confronted by Deborah. When
Deborah summoned the twelve tribes together to confront the common enemy, only Naphtali and Zebulun
responded. Pastor Schneider saw in this Old
Testament story [Judges 5:18] a parallel to the crisis which the Church
confronted in Nazi Germany, and he concluded that even if his was a minority
voice, he must act in harmony with his conscience, and protest.
Following his release from prison,
Pastor Schneider spent two months with his wife and a few family members and
friends in Baden-Baden and in Eschbach. He and Margarete returned
home for Harvest Thanksgiving (German:
Erntedankfest)
on October 3, 1937. Pastor Schneider was able to celebrate this occasion with
his Dickenschied congregation, but local police arrested him as he journeyed to
Womrath for
an evening worship service.
Buchenwald
Schneider was incarcerated in
Buchenwald, near Weimar,
on November 27, 1937, just a few months after the camp opened. In the labor commandos,
Pastor Schneider watched out for his fellow inmates. After being sentenced to
solitary confinement, he preached the good news of the Gospel from the window of
his prison cell. He was moved to the cell when he refused to remove his beret
in honour of Hitler on the Führer's birthday, April 20, 1938 and to salute the swastika
flag. He explained his behaviour by saying "I
cannot salute this criminal symbol". He also refused, as he had
done earlier, the Hitler salute, saying that "you
can only receive salvation (Heil) from the Lord and not from a human
being". From his cell, Schneider accused his captors and
encouraged his fellow inmates. On one occasion on Easter Sunday, when thousands
of prisoners were assembled for mustering, despite being severely handicapped
by previous torture he climbed to the cell window and shouted: "Comrades, listen to me. This is Pastor Schneider. People are
tortured and murdered here. So the Lord says, 'I am the resurrection and the
life!'" His speech was
interrupted by his tormentors. As others had pleaded years earlier, the man who
mopped the floors in the solitary confinement building begged Schneider,
"Please stop provoking the SS against you... They will beat you to death
if you continue preaching from your cell window".
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Paul Schneider's cell in Buchenwald
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Death
On July 18, 1939, Schneider was
murdered with a lethal injection of strophanthin
in the camp infirmary. Camp officials notified Margarete Schneider of her
husband’s death and she made the long journey from Dickenschied to retrieve his
body in a sealed coffin. Despite Gestapo surveillance, hundreds of people and
around two hundred fellow pastors attended Pastor Schneider’s funeral,
including many members of the Confessing Church. One of the pastors preached at
the grave side, “May God grant that the witness of your
shepherd, our brother, remain with you and continue to impact on future
generations and that it remain vital and bear fruit in the entire Christian
Church”.
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Pastor
Paul Schneider’s quote
[PHOTO
SOURCE: https://gratiaveritaslumen.wordpress.com/tag/daniel-513-30/]
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Literature
- Claude R. Foster jr.: Paul
Schneider, the Buchenwald apostle: a Christian martyr in Nazi Germany; a
sourcebook on the German Church struggle; SSI Bookstore, West Chester
University, Westchester, Pennsylvania 1995, ISBN
1-887732-01-2.
German edition: Paul Schneider. Seine Lebensgeschichte. Der Prediger von Buchenwald; translated by Brigitte Otterpohl; Hänssler, Holzgerlingen 2001, ISBN 3-7751-3660-6. - Albrecht Aichelin: Paul Schneider. Ein radikales Glaubenszeugnis gegen die Gewaltherrschaft des Nationalsozialismus; Kaiser, Gütersloh 1994, ISBN 3-579-01864-7.
- Margarete Schneider: Paul Schneider – Der Prediger von Buchenwald. Neu herausgegeben von Elsa-Ulrike Ross und Paul Dieterich; SCM Hänssler, Holzgerlingen 2009, ISBN 978-3-7751-4996-9.
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