An Austrian conscientious objector during World War II

[pieter]

Franz Jägerstätter



Franz Jägerstätter (also spelled Jaegerstaetter in English) (20 May 1907 – 9 August 1943) (born as Franz Huber) was an Austrian conscientious objector during World War II. Jägerstätter was sentenced to death and executed. He was later declared a martyr and beatified by the Catholic Church.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_J%C3%A4gerst%C3%A4tter

A Hidden Life (2019 film)



A Hidden Life (formerly titled Radegund) is a 2019 epic historical drama film written and directed by Terrence Malick, starring August Diehl, Valerie Pachner, and Matthias Schoenaerts with both Michael Nyqvist and Bruno Ganz in their final performances. The film depicts the life of Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian farmer and devout Catholic who refused to fight for the Nazis in World War II. The film's title was taken from George Eliot's book Middlemarch.

The film had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2019 and was theatrically released in the United States on December 13, 2019.[6] It was the final film to be released under the Fox Searchlight Pictures name before Walt Disney Studios changed the company's name to Searchlight Pictures on January 17, 2020.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hidden_Life_(2019_film)

[pieter]

[pieter]

This is the stpry of an Austrian Roman Catholic who stood up against Nazism from his Christians values as a Roman Catholic. This is a story of the Roman Catholic resistance to Nazism inside the Third Reich. This was a very conscious and brave man.

Austria


Hitler in Vienna in March 1938

Austria was overwhelmingly Catholic. At the direction of Cardinal Innitzer, the churches of Vienna pealed their bells and flew swastikas for Hitler's arrival in the city on 14 March. Cardinal Innitzer was called to Rome, where the pope rebuked him for his show of enthusiasm. Austrian bishop Alois Hudal published a book in 1937 praising the German ideal of racial unity. With power secured in Austria, the Nazis repeated their persecution of the Church and in October, a Nazi mob ransacked Innitzer's residence, after he had denounced Nazi persecution of the Church. In Britain, the Catholic Herald provided the following contemporary account on 14 October 1938:

The invasion was a reply to a courageous sermon the Cardinal had preached in the Cathedral earlier in the evening, in which the Cardinal told his packed congregation that " in the last few months you have lost everything!' This sermon marked the end of Cardinal Innitzer's attempt to establish a religious peace with the Nazis. The attempt has failed. Cardinal Innitzer is now in line with his German brothers openly urging Catholics to resist anti-Catholic measures.

— Extract from Britain's Catholic Herald, Oct.

In a "Table Talk" of July 1942 discussing his problems with the Catholic Church, Hitler singles out Innitzer's early gestures of cordiality as evidence of the extreme caution with which Church diplomats must be treated: "there appeared a man who addressed me with such self-assurance and beaming countenance, just as if, throughout the whole of the Austrian Republic he had never even touched a hair of the head of any National Socialist!"

Following the Nazi annexation of Austria, many priests were arrested. The Austrian priests Jakob Gapp and Otto Neururer, both executed during the Third Reich were beatified in the 1996. Neururer was tortured and hanged at Buchenwald and Jakob Gapp was guillotined in Berlin.

The Blessed Maria Restituta, a Franciscan nun working as a nurse at the Mödling hospital was outspoken in her opposition to the new Nazi regime, and refused to remove crucifixes from her hospital walls. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1942, she was beheaded in March 1943 in Vienna.

Comment Pieter: My Polish Roman Catholic grandmother received empathic understanding from Austrian Roman Catholics. An Austrian priest even allowed them in the morning in his church to pray and have their Polish laymen service. This next to the brutal, vicious and sadistic German and Austrian Nazi's my grandmother experienced in Poland, both SS and other German Nazi organisations.

Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_resistance_to_Nazi_Germany

[pieter]

[pieter]

[karl]

Pieter

An interesting presentation of this man: Herr Jägerstätter, an Austrian conscientious objector. With upon his story, how may I reply for as not to bring disgrace to you and or our good friends here. For in full knowledge of your self and others lost family in that war and with this, the crimes committed under the leadership of Adolf Hitler. With this, not to bring disgrace to the Church that has brought him with such honour.

But, if to stay silent, would be a lie, with this, to say my peace over silence. For it is for those solders that fought the Communist Russians not for the Nazi manner, but for their Germany, their families, their homes, their very lives and for their comrades that were to risk their lives in combat conditions. With this, these solders had no other choice if to keep their lives in honour.

We live in a world of decisions, both personal and what we are subject to, with this, Herr Jägerstätter did willfully made his of many. This was to forfeit not only his life, but to take from his wife, a husband and father to his three children. With this, to leave his family to the wilds of what ever with out his protection, it is apparant by his actions he removed his responsiblity to his family, the German State, his obligation to the German military of that time and to the solders he was never to serve with.

My self? I see no honour in this man for he deserves little but contempt.

If not for the story as based not entirely as entertainment, but on the story of an actual event, I would have not spoken as above.

Karl

[pieter]

[pieter]

Karl,

I saw the movie and have to say it was a long and beautiful and heavy movie. It brought back memories of the Austrian Alps, the Swiss mountains I saw between Italy and Zürich in Switzerland, Sudety (Sudetenland) mountains in Poland, the Belgian Ardennes with the farm life of the French speaking Walloon farmers, Polish farm life and farmers in the Communist Peoples Republic, and experiences I had with mountain landscapes in France (high mountains I saw and drove over near Nice and Cannes in Southern France), The mountains of the São Miguel Island, the mountains of La Gomera, one of the Canary islands and the mountains of the Western Cape Provence in South Africa.

The mowing the grass in the movie brought back to me that I mowed the grass in the Ardennes mountains for days and sometimes weeks. The farm life in Hidden Life brought me back to the farm life of the Walloon farmers in the Ardennes and the Dutch farmers in Zeeland, when I grew up in Zeeland. Maybe more modern than in the Austria of the Second World War, the movie is placed in, but that sense of farm life, they hey, the animals, the slaughtered hanging pig, the fields with the wild grass, wild flowers, wild crops, wild weeds, these mountain skies, mountain streams, brooks and rivers. The village life in which your heard sometimes that raw Austrain country dialect of the hostile farmers, who treated that family as traitors, enemies and filth. By ignoring them, throwing stones at the children of the family of Jägerstätter, and throwing hostile looks at miss Jägerstätter and the Jägerstätter family members. The tension in the movie is terrible, the discord, doubt, the pious Roman-Catholic villagers in the high Austrian mountains and that incredible view of the Austrian Alps and these mountain waterfalls.

I came out of a movie which lasted 3 hours. I can't judge Jägerstätter. Jägerstätter had his Austrian farmer mindset. His own internal issues, his ethics and values, his struggle with life in his day and time. It was a very traditional, conservative, Roman Catholic Austrian rural community he came from. Some people greated with Grüß Gott and others with Heil Hitler. The movie shows the slowly increasing influence and the infiltration of the Nazi ideology, mentality and mindset into the Austrian population. It also shows Austrians who had difficulties with the new order, because it conflicted with their traditional Austrian rural Roman Catholic way of life.

Jägerstätter was a troubled man, a conscious man, a man who did not easily made his dicision. If I can rely on the movie. Karl, you are part of the successor of Nazi Germany (the Third Reich), and therefor I see your reaction to this topic from the perspective of someone who thinks with the German mindset. The Bundeswhehr is the follow up of the Wehrmacht, the Bundespolizei is the follow up of the Ordnungspolizei, the Verfassungsschutz and the BND are the follow ups of the Abwehr and the Gestapo. You lost your father at the Eastern Front. I can't disconnect that fact from your reply.

I thought about what I should have done if I had been Franz Jägerstätter during the Second World War in Austria and Germany (Berlin) during the movie saturday evening (21:30 - 24:00) but stopped that thought experiment during the movie and just tried to see and experience what the movie showed. The different perspectives of miss Jägerstätter, Franz Jägerstätter, the mother of Franz Jägerstätter, the sister of the wife of Franz Jägerstätter, the parish priest of the community, the Austrian bisshop, the German Wehrmacht prison guards and judges.

It was hard for me to understand the mindset of Franz Jägerstätter. It is also hard for me to judge Franz Jägerstätter. His wife, his mother and his children suffered a lot.

Jägerstätter was born in Sankt Radegund, Upper Austria, a small village between Salzburg and Braunau am Inn. He was the illegitimate child of Rosalia Huber, a chambermaid, and Franz Bachmeier, a farmer. As his parents could not afford a marriage, Franz was first cared for by his grandmother, Elisabeth Huber. His biological father was killed in World War I when Franz was still a child. When his mother married in 1917, Franz was adopted by her husband, Heinrich Jägerstätter.

In his youth, Franz gained a reputation for being a wild fellow, but, in general, his daily life was like that of most Austrian peasants. He worked as a farmhand and also as a miner in Eisenerz, until in 1933 he inherited the farmstead of his foster father. In that same year, he fathered an out-of-wedlock daughter, Hildegard Auer. On Maundy Thursday of 1936, he married Franziska Schwaninger (4 March 1913–16 March 2013), a deeply religious woman. After the wedding liturgy, the bridal couple proceeded on a pilgrimage to Rome. Inspired by his wife, Jägerstätter began to study the Bible and the lives of saints. The marriage produced three daughters.

When German troops moved into Austria in March 1938, Jägerstätter rejected the offered position as Radegund mayor. He was the only person in the village to vote against the Anschluss in the plebiscite of 10 April; nevertheless, the local authorities suppressed his dissent and announced unanimous approval. Although he was not involved with any political organization and did undergo one brief period of military training, he remained openly anti-Nazi. On 8 December 1940, he joined the Third Order of Saint Francis and from summer 1941 worked as a sacristan at the local parish church, being deferred from military service four times.

Drafted for the first time on 17 June 1940, Jägerstetter, aged 33, was again conscripted into the German Wehrmacht in October and completed his training at the Enns garrison. He refused to take the Hitler oath, but could return home in 1941 under an exemption as a farmer. Faced with his experiences in military service, the suppression of the church, as well as reports on the Nazi T4 "euthanasia" program, he began to examine the morality of the war. He even proceeded to Linz to discuss this with his bishop but emerged from the conversation saddened that the episcopate seemed afraid to confront the issues.

After many delays, Jägerstätter was finally called to active duty on 23 February 1943. By this time, he had three daughters with his wife, the eldest not quite six. He maintained his position against fighting for Nazi Germany and upon entering into the Wehrmacht garrison in Enns on March 1 declared his conscientious objection. His offer to serve as a paramedic was ignored. He was immediately arrested and placed in custody, first at the Linz remand prison, then from 4 May at Berlin-Tegel. A priest from his village visited him in jail and tried to talk him into serving, but did not succeed. When he heard of the fate of the Austrian priest Father Franz Reinisch, who had been executed for his refusal to take the Hitler oath, he was determined to go the same way.

Accused of Wehrkraftzersetzung (undermining of military morale), Jägerstätter was sentenced to death in a military trial at the Reichskriegsgericht in Berlin-Charlottenburg on 6 July 1943. He was deported to Brandenburg-Görden Prison on 9 August, where he was executed by guillotine in the afternoon, aged 36. After the war, in 1946, his ashes were buried at the Sankt Radegund cemetery.

Cheers,
Pieter

[pieter]

[pieter]

[pieter]

[pieter]

[pieter]

Karl,

To be honest watching the movie I could’nt disconnect myself from the suffering of my grandmother in Austria, my own experience of coldness and distance from the Austrians in Vienna in 1994 and the fact that many Austrians were vicious Nazi’s. Austria was more Nazi than Germany. I couldn’t get that fought out of my head.

Cheers,
Pieter.

[karl]

Feb 16, 2020 5:08:05 GMT -7 pieter said:

Karl,

To be honest watching the movie I could’nt disconnect myself from the suffering of my grandmother in Austria, my own experience of coldness and distance from the Austrians in Vienna in 1994 and the fact that many Austrians were vicious Nazi’s. Austria was more Nazi than Germany. I couldn’t get that fought out of my head.

Cheers,
Pieter.

Pieter

Your reaction and experience in Austria was and is my own exactly. It would be a mistake to place all Austrian people in the same basket for they are people after all. But, as a general manner, at least for my self, was to take care first with conversation, then if a friendly return, to continue with what ever was on the agenda. My experience was with out side the cities, most people were on the surface approachable even though they recognized my self as a tourist. Once to view the number plate of my motorcycle, they did ask questions and this would lead most of the time, a friendly exchange.

For the most part, my impression of Austria was a nice land to travel through, but not to live in.

With your analysis of my thinking in response to our subject, of the foundation of my reasoning is both accurate and factual, for this I may not contest your analysis, for what is true is truth. For my self have been for much of my years, caught between two worlds, one of my Friesian/Dansk structure in thinking, and the many years living and working in a German manner.

Your presentation of Herr Jägerstätter was some what both complex and exacting, very well presented in your hand as a journalist as very well indicated. For withen your presentation,was presentation of the complexity of his psychological thinking and effects of the socialogical impact of his upbringing and religious training. With this, the enormous negative impact in conflicting ideology that was with the Nazi doctrine in full conflict of his own.

For as above, this man was willing with full knowledge, his reasoning in such conflict would lead to his death, is testiment to his convictions.

Karl

[pieter]

Dear Karl,

Like you I had a very hard time during the movie to understand Franz Jägerstätter, because in my person and life human beings, family members, loyal friends, colleagues are more important than ideologies, theology, faith or principles. I think I would have chosen for my wife and with great dissatisfaction, dislike of the Nazi's and even rejection of the war would have fought as a Wehrmacht soldier in that rotten war of herr Adolf Hitler. But that is me. Again I can't judge Franz Jägerstätter, for me he neither a traitor or a coward, nor a saint, hero or example. One thing I agree with with his Nazi Wehrmacht interogator who said, "your resistance accomplished nothing, because you are inside this Wehrmacht prison and nobody outside knows who you are".

Franz Jägerstätter for me is not a Sophie Scholl, nor a Dietrich Bonhoeffer nor a Claus von Stauffenberg, nor Willy Brandt and the German social democratic politician Kurt Schumacher. Schumacher was staunchly anti-Nazi. In a Reichstag speech on 23 February 1932, he excoriated Nazism as "a continuous appeal to the inner swine in human beings" and stated the movement had been uniquely successful in "ceaselessly mobilizing human stupidity." Schumacher survived severely beating in prison and several concebtration camps and reorganised the SPD in Hanover after the war and became the national leader of the SPD.

Bundeskanzler Konrad Adenauer admired Schumacher's integrity, willpower and courage, even while opposing his policies, and was shocked at his death. "Despite our differences", he said, "we were united in a common goal, to do everything possible for the benefit and well-being of our people."

Franz Jägerstätter was an interesting character and fact was that his religious, ethical and moral aversion against the Nazi evils were stronger than his own fear of pain, suffering and hardship. That is my conclusion of the movie.

Cheers,
Pieter