It's about time someone made a proper film about this. Let's hope it's done right.
"If God gives us free will, we are responsible for what we do, what we fail to do."
This is humanity at its best.
"I can't do what I believe is wrong. We have to stand up to evil."
How many hundreds, thousands, millions have said it, and meant it, and died for it? They don't have movies made about them, but hopefully this is meant for them as well.
"Whatever you do, I am with you, always."
And there is love, pure, simple, without conditions.
Again, let's hope they do this right, without playing to any other grubby agendas. Jägerstätter was about so much more than that.
—bsc
A Hidden Life, directed by Terrence Malick (2019)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJXmdY4lVR0
[This is the introduction to Franz Jägerstätter: Letters and Reflections from Prison, edited by Erna Putz and published by Orbis Books.]
By Jim Forest
Human beings have at least one trait in common with fish: we tend to
move in schools. When the drums of war are beating and the latest slogan
of mass destruction is announced (“for God and country,” “the war to
end all wars,” “the war to make the world safe for democracy,” “the war
to defeat the axis of evil,” “the war on terror”), few and far between
are those who, having been summoned, refuse to take up weapons.
On every side, there are those who go willingly, convinced of the
war’s rightness or at least confident their government knows what it is
doing and would not spend human lives for anything less than the
survival of the nation. There are still others who have their doubts but
avoid knowing better — they rightly sense that it’s dangerous to look
beyond the slogans. There are also those who know that the war at issue
is deeply flawed or even unjustified, but who go along anyway, knowing
there is always a price to pay for saying no and not wishing to pay that
price.
For many the idea of disobedience simply doesn’t occur. There is the
joy — at least the sense of security — of being in step with others and
acting in unity, even if it turns out that such unity is being put to
tragic or murderous uses. We’re human beings, after all, and thus — for
worse as well as better — profoundly social. We like to bond with those
around us — to cheer for the same teams, to see things in a similar way,
to be “good citizens,” to do “what is expected of us.” Those of us who
are Christians may well find ourselves being urged “to do our part” even
by our bishops, pastors and theologians.
Franz Jägerstätter was one of the least likely persons to question
the justifications for war being announced daily by those in charge or
to say to no to the demands of his government. What did he know? And,
for that matter, who would care about his perceptions? He was only a
farmer. He had never been to a university or theological school. His
formal education had occurred entirely in a one-room schoolhouse. Though
active in his parish, which he served as sexton, he was not a person
whose name would ring a bell for his bishop. No priest or bishop or
theologian, no matter how critical of Nazi doctrine, was announcing it
was a sin to obey the commands of the Hitler regime when it came to war.
So far as he knew none of his fellow Catholics in Austria, even those
who openly disagreed with Nazi ideology, had failed to report for
military duty when the notice came.
How could so unimportant a person dare to have such important
convictions? How could a humble Catholic farmer imagine he had a clearer
conscience than those who led the Church in his homeland? And, in any
event, didn’t his responsibility to his wife and children have priority
over his views about war and government?
Indeed Franz Jägerstätter did his best, insofar as his conscience
allowed, to survive the war and the Hitler years. Submitting to military
training, he was in uniform for nearly a year but never took part in
the actual war. For an extended period, he was allowed to return to his
farm and family, but when summoned to active service, he saw no option
but to refuse further compliance. He was immediately arrested and
imprisoned. After just over five months in prison, on the 9th of August
1943, he was taken to a place of execution near Berlin and was beheaded
by guillotine.
Franz Jägerstätter was just one more on the long list of the dead.
There were so many others who perished in those years that one more
fatality was not worth noticing. There were no press reports, no
interviews with his grieving wife. But a significant entry was made in
the register of his parish in the village of St. Radegund: “Franz
Jägerstätter died on 9 August 1943 in Brandenburg [an der Havel, a town
near Berlin] the death of a martyr.”
Years after the war was over, the name “Franz Jägerstätter” gradually
came to light almost by chance. Gordon Zahn, an American sociologist,
had written a book, German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars. In the
course of his research, he had found a reference to an Austrian peasant
who had paid with his life for refusing any part in Hitler’s wars. With
the one book finished, he started researching what became In Solitary Witness: The Life and Death of Franz Jägerstätter.
Zahn’s book generated a great deal of discussion, especially in the
Catholic Church. How was it possible that “a man of no importance” could
have possessed a moral clarity absent from those who were supposed to
provide spiritual leadership to Austrian and German Catholics? Had any
bishop expressed the view that Hitler’s wars were unjust? Answer: not
one.
At the Second Vatican Council, Archbishop Thomas Roberts, a Jesuit
who had formerly been archbishop of Bombay, recounted Jägerstätter’s
life, pointing out that the heroic stand taken by this remarkable
Austrian could not be credited to pastoral guidance from those leading
the Church in Austria or Germany or from the text of any existing
Catholic catechism. In fact rulers could count on their Catholic
subjects to obey them no less unquestioningly than they obeyed their
Church.
Should not the Church, asked Archbishop Roberts, speak more clearly
about the responsibility for its members to say no when they were
required by their rulers to commit sins or be part of a system based on
lies and injustice? Should the Church not make clear that conscientious
objectors to war have the support and admiration of their Church for
bearing witness to the Gospel? Should the Church not rejoice that Franz
Jägerstätter had given such a witness against an unjust war — a witness
Roberts compared to that of another beheaded hero of the Church, St.
Thomas More? Should not the Church express itself in such a way that it
would be more likely that Catholics in the future would be better
equipped by their Church to take a similar stand, even if, like
Jägerstätter, it cost them their lives? Was not a martyr’s death far
preferable to complicity in evil?
Archbishop Roberts’ intervention was not without effect. While it was
simply a bishop’s reflection on the life of an as-yet uncanonized saint
and the implications of that saint’s witness, it turned out to be a
factor in the direction taken by the bishops in the final document
issued by the Second Vatican Council, known as Gaudium et Spes
(its first three Latin words) or the Pastoral Constitution on the Church
in the Modern World, as it was called in its more lengthy English
title.
The Council declared, “Every act of war directed to the
indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their
inhabitants is a crime against God and humanity, which merits firm and
unequivocal condemnation.” The Council also condemned other crimes
against life: abortion, euthanasia, slavery and torture among them.
Emphasizing the role of conscience, the Council called on states to
make legal provision for those “who, for reasons of conscience, refuse
to bear arms, provided that they agree to serve the human community in
some other way.” Those who renounce violence altogether, seeking a more
just and compassionate society by nonviolent means, were honored: “We
cannot fail to praise those who renounce the use of violence in
vindication of their rights and who resort to methods of defense which
are otherwise available to weaker parties too, provided this can be done
without injury to the rights and duties of others or to the community
itself.” Those who, in the name of obedience, obey commands which
condemn the innocent and defenseless were described as “criminal,” while
those who disobey such corrupt commands merit “supreme commendation.”
It was a text that would have made Franz Jägerstätter rejoice. So too
all the other Christian martyrs down through the centuries who have
obeyed God rather than man.
For nearly every bishop who came to Rome to attend the Council, the
name of Franz Jägerstätter was unknown before Archbishop Roberts made
his intervention. Today there are few if any bishops in the Catholic
Church who are unaware of Jägerstätter’s name and story. On the 26th of
October 2007, Franz Jägerstätter was officially beatified. His wife and
descendants were among those taking part in the event. Franz
Jägerstätter is now known throughout his Church as Blessed Franz.
Perhaps before too many years it will be Saint Franz.
Though Franz Jägerstätter’s life has come to be a matter of
significance in the history of the 20th century, and his beatification a
vivid indication that the Catholic hierarchy today is taking to heart
what the bishops who took part in the Second Vatican Council had to say
about war, peace and individual conscience, few people on the calendar
of saints had a more unpromising beginning in life.
Franz Jägerstätter was born in on May 20, 1907 in the Austrian
village of St. Radegund. His mother was an unmarried farm servant,
Rosalia Huber. His father, Franz Bachmeier, was the unmarried son of a
farmer from Tarsdorf in the Austrian province of Salzburg; he died in
the First World War. After Franz’s birth, Rosalia’s mother, Elisabeth
Huber, shoemaker’s widow, took charge of Franz’s care.
It was not uncommon for those with little money or property to
conceive children outside marriage, but marriage often followed. It
wasn’t so in this case, perhaps due to parental objections regarding one
or the other potential partner. When Rosalia Huber at last married
years later it was in 1917, a decade after Franz’s birth, and not to
Franz’s father but to Heinrich Jägerstätter. He was a man of property —
the owner of the Leherbauernhof farm in St. Radegund. In addition to
marrying Rosalia, Heinrich Jägerstätter adopted her son, thus giving him
the family name we know him by. They were to have no children of their
own.
Franz’s formal education was slight and brief. From 1913 to 1921, he
attended the one-room school in St. Radegund where a single teacher
taught seven grades. At a given time, there were about 50 to 60 children
in all. But one sees from his writing that he was a quick learner with a
well-organized and independent mind.
Franz’s birthplace was as inauspicious as his education. The village
of St. Radegund, on the River Salzach, is on the northwestern edge of
Austria. The village, with a population of about five hundred, appears
only on the most detailed maps of Austria. Mozart’s Salzburg is to the
south, Linz to the east, Vienna much further east. The closest major
German city is Munich. Hitler’s birthplace, the Austrian town of
Braunau, isn’t far from St. Radegund. St. Radegund’s major claim to fame
for many years was the four-hour Passion Plays it organized from time
to time, the last one occurring in 1933. Like nearly everyone in the
community, Franz had a part to play — he was one of the Roman soldiers
involved in the crucifixion of Christ.
Franz grew up mainly among farmers. The Jägerstätter farm was one
among many in the area. It was a region in which Catholicism was deeply
embedded. The idea of not being Catholic was, for nearly everyone Franz
knew, as unthinkable as moving to another planet, though he did have a
cousin who became a Jehovah’s Witness.
One reads in the accounts of saints’ lives how amazingly pious some
of them were from the cradle to the grave. The stories local people tell
of Franz as a young man go in the opposite direction. In his teens he
wasn’t hesitant to get involved in fist fights. He enjoyed all the
pastimes that his friends enjoyed. Along with all his neighbors, he went
to church when everyone else did, but no one would have remarked on his
being a saint in the making.
In 1930, age 23, Franz worked for a time in the Austrian mining town
of Eisenerz. This was his first encounter with a secularized factory
culture. Here he met people who didn’t bother with church or have any
good words to say about Christianity. Under their influence, in that
period Franz slept in on Sunday mornings, skipping Mass.
Returning to St. Radegund, Franz surprised his family and neighbors
by arriving on a motorcycle he had purchased with money he earned in the
city. No one else in the area had a motorcycle.
Far more important, though the most attentive neighbor would have
realized it in the early stages, was the fact that after his return to
St. Radegund Franz’s religious life not only revived but gradually came
into sharper focus. Unfortunately, letters that might give a clue about
this period of his life either do not survive or were never written. It
may be that Franz’s brief encounter with a more secular culture in his
time away ultimately have the effect of bringing him closer to a faith
he had previously taken for granted.
Not that anyone would have regarded Franz as notably pious or
altogether converted from his former rowdy ways. In August 1933, a local
farm maidservant, Theresia Auer, gave birth to a daughter, Hildegard.
Franz was the child’s father. The fact that there had been no marriage
before the birth, or would be afterward, was attributed locally to the
determined opposition of Franz’s mother, who seemed to doubt that Franz
was in fact Hildegard’s father. What is striking is that for the rest of
his life, Franz not only provided material support for Hildegard, but
remained very close to her, visiting her often. Just before his marriage
to Franziska Schwaninger, Franz and his wife-to-be offered to adopt
Hildegard, but Hildegard’s mother and grandmother (who was raising the
child) declined.
According to local consensus, the most important single factor
attributed to bringing about a change in Franz was his marriage to
Franziska Schwaninger. Nearly everyone who lived in the area saw this as
the main border-crossing event of his adult life. Franz was, neighbors
said, “a different man” afterwards, a fact most of all reflected in the
intensity of his religious life.
But in fact the transition was not quite as abrupt as it seemed to
neighbors. Prior to marriage, Franz had thought seriously of entering a
monastery. One of Franziska’s initial concerns regarding Franz, once
they met, was to make sure he had a more than superficial commitment to
his faith. She was relieved not only that he attended Mass regularly,
but also that he was a committed and thoughtful Catholic.
Franziska Schwaninger, six years younger than Franz, had grown up on a
farm in the village of Hochburg, about five miles (12 km) away from St.
Radegund. She came from a deeply religious family — her father and
grandmother were both members of the Marian Congregation. Her
grandmother also belonged to the Third Order of St. Francis. Before
Franziska’s marriage, she had considered becoming a nun.
After a short engagement, the two were married on the April 9, 1936.
Franz was almost 29, Franziska 23. The honeymoon that followed startled
everyone in or near St. Radegund. The couple went to none of the usual
places visited by the newly married, but opted instead to go as pilgrims
to Rome, at the same time ignoring deeply-embedded local tradition by
declining to have a wedding feast. Married at 6 in the morning, before
noon they were on their way to Rome, a city crowded with churches built
over the tombs of martyrs of the early Church or the locations of their
execution. To be in so many martyr-linked places of worship must have
helped prepare the newly married couple for what would happen in the
years to come.
The Roman pilgrimage had been Franz’s idea, but Franziska had eagerly
agreed. Returning home, Franz proposed to Franziska that they go on a
similar pilgrimage every ten years. It wasn’t to be.
While Franz was already a committed Catholic Christian, in the early
months of their marriage it was Franziska whose spiritual life was the
most developed. Franziska went to Mass on many weekdays, often received
communion, and kept the Friday devotions associated with the Sacred
Heart of Jesus. But Franz was quickly influenced by her example.
Neighbors were surprised and in many cases critical. The general view
was that it was all right for women to do these things, if they had the
time, but a man must give priority to his farm and keep the Church and
its services in their place. Franz, while remaining a productive and
efficient farmer, increasingly put the Church first.
It was a happy marriage. Franz once told his wife, “I could never
have imagined that being married could be so wonderful.” In one of his
letters to Franziska during his period of army training in 1940, he
mentions how “fortunate and harmonious” have been their years of
marriage. “This good fortune is unforgettable, and will accompany me
through time and eternity. You also know how the children bring me joy.
For this reason, a feeling of good fortune often comes over me here so
that tears of joy flow from my eyes when I think about our reunion.”
Years after her father’s death, the Jägerstätters’ eldest daughter,
wondering aloud whether she would ever marry, recalls her mother warning
her that married couples often fight. Her daughter responded, “But you
and daddy didn’t fight.”
Looking back on the days when her husband was still alive, Franziska
observed, “We helped one another go forward in faith.” Indeed, Franziska
was not only an equal partner in their marriage, someone whose example
brought Franz closer to a fearless Christian faith, but also a partner
in her husband’s martyrdom, even while hoping against hope that Franz’s
refusal to be a soldier would not lead to his execution.
The Jägerstätters had three children, all daughters: Rosalia (Rosi) in 1937, Maria in 1938, and Aloisia (Loisi) in 1940.
Theirs was not a marriage out of touch with the world beyond their farm.
Franz and Franziska were attentive to what was going on just across the
river from St. Radegund in Germany where Hitler had been German
chancellor since 1933. They were aware of Hitler’s pagan ideology, the
brutality of his followers, and also knew of the intensive effort
underway to build up Germany’s military. They also were aware of the
anti-Nazi writings of the Bishop of Linz, Johannes Maria Gföllner, who
in 1933 had stated in a pastoral letter read aloud in every parish of
the Linz diocese: “Nazism is spiritually sick with materialistic racial
delusions, un-Christian nationalism, a nationalistic view of religion,
with what is quite simply sham Christianity.” The racial purity so dear
to the Nazis was condemned by Bishop Gföllner as “a backsliding into an
abhorrent heathenism… The Nazi standpoint on race is completely
incompatible with Christianity and must therefore be resolutely
rejected.” In 1937, four years later, he declared, “It is impossible to
be both a good Catholic and a true Nazi.” (By 1941, Linz had a new
bishop who was to speak much more cautiously.)
Meanwhile, Nazism’s dark shadow was spreading in Austria as well.
There was more and more talk of Austria fully incorporating itself into
Germany, though in St. Radegund, as in many places throughout Austria,
the Nazis had little support.
One important factor in helping people keep their distance from
Nazism was the widespread awareness that the Nazi movement was only a
degree less hostile to Christianity than the Bolsheviks in Soviet
Russia. Nazis regarded the values of the New Testament with contempt and
saw those who attended church as stupid and weak. In Germany, they
knew, Christians found themselves living in a steadily tightening noose
of restrictions. The Nazis had made clear that one of their most urgent
priorities was to separate children and young people from the Church and
in its place make them into Hitler Youth members.
The Nazis didn’t hide their hostility to the teachings of Christ and
the churches that spread his teaching. In the words of one prominent
Nazi, Roland Freisler, State Secretary of the Reich Ministry of Justice:
“Christianity and we are alike in only one respect: we lay claim to the
whole individual. … ‘From which do you take your orders? From the
hereafter or from Adolf Hitler? To whom do you pledge your loyalty and
your faith?’”
On the 12th of March 1938, the 8th Army of the German Wehrmacht
crossed the German-Austrian border. Assisted by the local Nazi movement
and supported by the vast majority of the Austrian population, German
troops quickly took control of Austria, then organized a national
plebiscite on April 10 to confirm the union with Germany. With few
daring to vote against what had already been imposed by military
methods, the annexation (Anschluss) of Austria by Germany was
even ratified by popular ballot. Austria, now an integral part of the
Third Reich, ceased to exist as an independent state. What had been
Austria was renamed Ostmark.
Well before the Anschluss, Franz had been an anti-Nazi, but
the event that brought his aversion to a much deeper level was a
remarkable dream he had in January 1938. Perhaps it was triggered by a
newspaper article he had read a few days earlier reporting that 150,000
more young people had been accepted into the Hitler Youth movement.
In the dream he saw “a wonderful train” coming round a mountain. The
gleaming engine and carriages seemed especially attractive to children,
who “flowed to this train, and were not held back.” Then a voice said to
him, “This train is going to hell.” He woke Franziska to tell her of
his dream and continued to think about it long afterward. The train, he
realized, symbolized the glittering Nazi regime with all its spectacles
and its associated organizations, Hitler Youth being one of the most
important and spiritually corrupting.
The dream seemed to Franz a clarifying message from heaven. The Nazi
movement — with its racism, its cult of violence, its elimination of
those members of society regarded as unfit, its efforts to suppress
Christianity — was satanic. It was nothing less than a gateway to hell.
In St. Radegund it was widely known that Franz, ignoring the advice of his neighbors, had voted against the Anschluss,
but, in reporting the results to the new regime in Vienna, Franz’s
solitary vote was left unrecorded. It was seen as endangering the
village to put on record that even one person had dared raise a
discordant voice.
After all, as Franz was painfully aware, even Austria’s Catholic
hierarchy had advocated a yes vote. Afterward Cardinal Innitzer,
principal hierarch of the Catholic Church in Austria, signed a
declaration endorsing the Anschluss. The words “Heil Hitler!”
were above his signature. Innitzer was among the first to meet Hitler
following the Führer’s triumphant entry into what was now the Ostmark
region of Germany. That same year, in honor of Hitler’s birthday, he
ordered that all Austrian churches fly the swastika flag, ring their
bells, and pray for Hitler. Presumably the cardinal hoped such an action
on his part would be repaid by the Nazi regime with a more tolerant
attitude toward the Church. In fact, following the Anschluss,
the situation for Austrian Catholics proved to be even worse than it was
for their counterparts in Germany. Many priests were jailed or sent to
concentration camps, youth education by the Church was all but
eliminated, church newspapers were closed, church processions were
banned, and, in many parish churches, Mass on important feast days, even
Christmas, was prohibited unless the feast fell on a Sunday.
If someone greeted Franz with the Nazi salute and the words “Heil Hitler,” Franz would respond, minus the salute, with the words “Pfui Hitler.” As Franz saw it, the Anschluss
was similar to what had happened in Jerusalem during Passion Week: the
crowd had chosen the criminal Barabas rather than their savior, Christ.
The Anschluss was only the beginning of a rapid campaign of
German territorial expansion. Following the annexation of Austria,
Germany occupied the Sudetenland, a region of Czechoslovakia. In March
1939, the rest of Czechoslovakia was taken over. In September 1939,
Hitler began the invasion of Poland, at which point Britain and France
responded with declarations of war and World War II began. In May 1940,
France and the Low Countries were invaded. In June 1941, Germany
launched its war on the “eastern front” with the Soviet Union, at the
same creating for itself an urgent need for a much larger army.
Having become citizens of Germany, every able Austrian was subject to
conscription. Franz was called up in June 1940, taking his military vow
in Braunau, Hitler’s birthplace, but a few days later was allowed to
return to his farm, as farmers were needed no less than soldiers. In
October he was called back for training as an army driver, but in April
1941, six months later, was again allowed to return to his farm.
While in the army, Franz made a significant commitment: he joined the
Third Order of St. Francis in December 1940. He may not have known that
the Order’s original rule, as written by Francis, obliged those who
joined not to possess or use deadly weapons, but without doubt he knew
that Francis was a man who, following his conversion, never threatened
or harmed anyone.
Franz’s brief period in the army, coupled with his recognition that
to assist the Nazi movement in any way was to oppose Christ and his
Church, made him realize that a return to the army was not possible for
him. If he were summoned again, even at the cost of his life, he would
have to say no.
Returning home from the army, Franz was ready for a deeper engagement
in his parish. He agreed to become sexton, a responsibility that
involved keeping the church and its grounds in good repair, assisting at
daily Mass, and helping arrange baptisms, weddings and funerals. His
priest was surprised at how quickly Franz learned all the Latin
responses.
It was not possible for Franziska to offer her wholehearted
endorsement — how could she sanction a course of action that would
result in the death of her beloved husband? — but she was equally
determined not to seek to change Franz’s mind. She knew her husband was
simply following Christ in the same way as the martyrs at whose tombs in
Rome they had prayed in the days following their wedding.
Franz readily talked about his views with anyone who would listen.
Most often he was told that his main responsibility was to his family
and that it would be better to risk death in the army on their behalf
than to take steps which would almost certainly guarantee his death.
While he would certainly do what he could to preserve his life for the
sake of his family, Franz noted that self-preservation did not make it
permissible to go and murder other people’s families. He pointed out
that to accept military service also meant leaving his family without
any assurance he would return alive. If he had to risk his life, was it
not better to do so for Christ rather than Hitler? As for his family,
surely God would not forget them. How good a husband and father would he
be if he chose social conformity over obedience to Christ’s teaching?
Did not Christ say, “He who loves father or mother more than me is not
worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not
worthy of me”?
Most of all Franz sought advice from the Church’s pastors. At the
time Fr. Ferdinand Fürthauer was the priest in St. Radegund, filling in
for Fr. Josef Karobath, who in 1940 had been jailed for delivering an
anti-Nazi sermon, then banished from the district. Far from encouraging
Franz, Fr. Fürthauer — a young man who felt unprepared for such a
situation — wondered if refusing military service, given that execution
was the almost certain penalty, was not the same as committing the
mortal sin of suicide. In later years Fr. Fürthauer wrote to Franziska,
“I wanted to save his life, but he did not want any pretense and
rejected all falsehood. I often pray that Franz Jägerstätter may forgive
me.”
Franz turned for guidance to his former pastor, Fr. Karobath. “We met
in the Bavarian town of Tittmoning,” Karobath recalls. “I wanted to
talk him out of it [Franz’s decision to refuse further military
service], but he defeated me again and again with words from the
scriptures.”
Franz even managed to meet with the Bishop of Linz, Joseph Fliesser,
successor to Bishop Gföllner. A list of questions Franz had written down
in preparation for the encounter has survived. Franz asked if it was
not sinful to support an ideology (Nazism) whose goals included
eradicating Christianity; if “the predatory raids” which Germany was
making in various countries could be regarded as acts of “a righteous
and holy war”; how is it possible for the Church, in burying the remains
of German soldiers killed in the war, to permit its priests to describe
the fallen as heroes and even saints; would it not be truer to regard
as heroes those who defended their homelands rather than those who
invade other countries; could the Church regard as righteous and good
whatever the crowd happens to be shouting; and, finally, can one be both
a soldier of Christ and a soldier of Nazism, thus both fighting for the
victory of Christ and his Church while at the same time fighting for
the victory of Nazism?
While Franz met with Bishop Fliesser, Franziska was in the adjacent
waiting room, no doubt praying. When Franz came out of the bishop’s
consulting room, Franziska recalls that he “was very sad and said to me:
“They don’t dare commit themselves or it will be their turn next.”
Franz had the impression that the bishop didn’t discuss his questions
because it was possible that his visitor might be a Gestapo spy.
In later years, Bishop Fliesser said, “In vain, I explained to him
the basic principles of morality concerning the degree of responsibility
which a private person and citizen bears for the actions of those in
authority, and reminded him of his far higher responsibility for those
within his private circle, particularly his family.”
It was, in fact, an answer any Catholic might have heard from any
bishop in any country at the time: If not a doctrine found in any
catechism, it was widely believed that any sins you commit under
obedience to your government are not your personal sins but are regarded
by God as the sins of those who lead the state. God would judge the
leader, not those who had obeyed his orders. But for Franz it seemed
obvious that, if God gives each of us free will and a conscience, each
of us is responsible for what we do and fail to do, all the more so if
we are consciously aware we have allowed ourselves to become servants of
evil masters.
Franz later made the compassionate observation that “the bishop has not experienced the grace that has been granted to me.”
In a notebook entry Franz made early in 1942, he remarks, “They [the
bishops and priests] are human beings of flesh and blood as we are, and
they can be weak. Perhaps they are even more tempted by the evil foe
than we are. Perhaps, too, they were too little prepared to take on this
struggle and decide for themselves whether to live or to die.”
Having gone through training, nearly two years went by without
Franz’s receiving a summons to return to the army. Throughout that
period, each time mail was delivered to the Jägerstätter farm, both
husband and wife were in dread. Finally on February 23, 1943, the
fateful letter arrived. “Now I’ve signed my death sentence,” Franz
remarked while putting his signature on the postal receipt. He was
ordered to report to a military base in Enns, near Linz, two days later.
The same day he wrote to Fr. Karobath, whom he still regarded as his
pastor even though the priest had been sent to another parish, “I must
tell you that soon you may be losing one of your parishioners…. Today I
received my conscription orders…. As no one can give me a dispensation
for the danger to the salvation of my soul which joining this movement
[the Nazis] would bring, I just can’t alter my resolve, as you know….
It’s always said that one shouldn’t do what I am doing because of the
risk to one’s life, but I take the view that those others who are
joining in the fighting aren’t exactly out of life-threatening danger
themselves. Among those fighting in Stalingrad, so I’ve heard, are also
four or five people from St. Radegund …. My family won’t forsake God and
the Blessed Virgin Mary…. It will be difficult for my loved ones. This
parting will surely be a hard one.”
It was indeed a hard parting. At the station in Tittmoning, Franz and
Franziska could not let go of each other until the train’s movement
forced them to separate. The conductor was furious.
Even as he boarded the train, Franz was already two days late for his
appointment at Enns. But, after all, there was no need to arrive on
time — once he reached Enns, he and Franziska had every reason to think,
it might be only days or weeks before his execution. His late arrival
could not make the punishment any worse.
Arriving at Enns the next morning, March 1, even then Franz took his
time, attending Mass in the local church before reporting to the
barracks. He also took time to send a letter to Franziska. It ended,
“Should it be God’s will that I do not see you again in this world, then
we hope that we shall see each other soon in heaven.” So far as Franz
knew, this was his last letter.
The following day, Franz having announced his refusal to serve, he
was placed under arrest and transported to the military remand prison in
nearby Linz. Franz’s stay in Linz lasted three months. Though many
others were tried and sentenced at Linz (a Catholic priest who visited
prisoners there recalled having accompanied 38 men to their execution),
Franz was not one among those tried.
Among prisoners at the Linz military prison from that period who
survived, there were those who vividly recalled Franz — how often they
saw him praying the rosary and his readiness to share with others his
meager food ration. Giving away a piece of bread on one occasion, he
claimed that a cup of coffee was enough for him.
No one knew better than Franziska how carefully thought out was the
position Franz was taking and what a determined man he was in matters of
faith. Even so, it was impossible for her not to encourage him
occasionally to search for some alternate path that might not violate
his conscience but perhaps would save his life. She wrote to him while
he was in Linz, “One does God’s will even when not understanding it.”
Even so, she confessed that she nurtured “the small hope that you would
change your decision … because you have compassion for me, and I cannot
help [being] me. I shall pray to the loving Mother of God that she will
bring you back to us at home if it is God’s will.”
“I want to save my life but not through lies,” wrote Franz to his
wife. “In [the army base at] Enns people wanted to trap me by means of
trick questions and thus to make me once again into a soldier. It was
not easy to keep my conviction. It may become even more difficult. But I
trust in God to let me know if it would be better for me to do
something different.”
In a letter dated March 11, he told Franziska that he was willing to
serve in the army medical corps “for here a person can actually do good
and exercise Christian love of neighbor in concrete ways,” but
apparently such a noncombatant alternative was never opened to him by
those responsible for his case.
Despite the heavy workload at the farm (in Franz’s absence, for the
first time Franziska had to till the fields), on the feast of Corpus
Christi she sought spiritual strength by making a pilgrimage on foot to
the Bavarian town of Altötting, home of the Chapel of the Miraculous
Image, one of Germany’s most visited shrines since medieval times — a
place long associated with miracles.
Franz’s last Easter before execution was spent in the Linz prison. He
wrote that day to Franziska: “‘Christ has risen, alleluia,’ so the
Church rejoices today. When we have to endure hard times, we must and
can rejoice with the Church. What is more joyful than that Christ has
again risen, and gone forth as the victor over death and hell. What can
give us Christians more comfort than that we no longer have to fear
death.”
Without warning, on May 4 Franz was taken by train to the prison at
Tegel, a suburb of Berlin. It had been decided that Franz’s was “a more
serious case” requiring a Reich Court Martial in the capital rather than
a provincial trial. Here Franz would spend the last three months of his
life in solitary confinement. (Among Franz’s fellow prisoners at Tegel
was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Protestant theologian who was arrested in
April 1943 after money was traced to him that had been used to help Jews
escape to Switzerland. After eighteen months a prisoner, Bonhoeffer was
executed in 1945.)
Franz says almost nothing in his letters about the conditions of life
at Tegel, but a priest, Fr. Franz Reinisch, who had been in the same
prison a year before Franz described it as “a foretaste of purgatory and
hell: the thoughts and experiences: never a friendly face, never to
feel any love, always only hard words – if this were to go on forever!
And then the screaming of some prisoners who can’t bear the loneliness
and the wrongful loss of their freedom, the constantly keeping silent,
the small cell, etc. and also, in the case of certain men, the spiritual
distress that weighs heavily on their hearts, the enchainment of those
condemned to death.”
On July 6 a brief trial occurred. Franz was convicted of “undermining
military morale” by “inciting the refusal to perform the required
service in the German army.” This was a capital offense. Franz was
sentenced to death. From this point on, he was kept in handcuffs. In a
letter to Franziska, Franz notes that he is writing with his “hands in
chains” (echoing the words of St. Paul when he was a prisoner in Rome).
On July 8, Franz wrote home, “It is a joy to be able to suffer for
Jesus and our faith. We have the joyful hope that the few days in this
life when we have been separated will be replaced by thousands of days
in eternity, where we shall rejoice with God and our heavenly Mother in
untroubled joy and good fortune. If we can only remain in the love of
God when difficult tests of our faith come to us.” Perhaps to spare his
family pain, or because the court sentence had not been confirmed, he
said nothing in his letter about the trial that had just occurred.
In a final effort to save Franz’s life, his court-assigned lawyer,
Friedrich Leo Feldmann, arranged a visit by Franziska and the priest of
St. Radegund, Fr. Fürthauer, in the hope they could convince his client
to change his mind. Were he to do so, Feldmann was confident the court
would withdraw its sentence.
Their 20-minute meeting was Franz and Franziska’s last. It happened
on July 9 in the presence of armed guards. Not to their surprise, the
visitors found that Franz saw no honorable alternative but to continue
with his refusal of military service. Fr. Fürthauer later recalled his
attempt to persuade Franz to accept army service for his family’s sake.
“He [Franz] said to me: ‘Can you promise me that if I join that movement
[the Nazi regime] that I shall not fall into mortal sin?’ ‘That I
cannot do’, I answered. ‘Then I won’t enlist,’ was his reply.” (In 2006,
Fr. Fürthauer was asked if he would still say the same to Franz were he
able to go back in time. “Today,” he responded, “I would not try to
persuade him to change his resolve, but would just give him my
blessing.”)
Back in St. Radegund, Franziska wrote to Fr. Karobath to report on
the meeting with Franz in Berlin, commenting with bitterness, “They [the
military officials] could easily have assigned him to the medical
corps, but they were naturally too proud for that, for it might have
looked like a compromise on their part.”
On July 14, Franz’s death sentence was confirmed by the Reich’s War
Court. On August 9, Franz was taken to Brandenburg/Havel where, at about
4 PM, he was killed by guillotine.
The priest who accompanied Franz to his execution, Fr. Albert
Jochmann, standing in that day for the chaplain at Brandenberg, later
told a community of Austrian nuns about Franz’s final hours. In the
early 1960s, one of them, Sr. Georgia, having learned that Gordon Zahn
was at work on a biography of Franz Jägerstätter, wrote to Zahn to
relate what the chaplain had said. Visiting Franz shortly after midnight
on August 9, he noticed on a small table in Franz’s cell a document
which, should Franz sign it, would allow him to leave prison and return
to the army. When Fr. Jochmann pointed it out, Franz pushed it aside,
saying, “I cannot and may not take an oath in favor of a government that
is fighting an unjust war.”
Sr. Georgia continued: “Later he was to witness the calm and composed
manner in which he [Franz Jägerstätter] walked to the scaffold.” He
told the sisters, themselves Austrian, “I can only congratulate you on
this countryman of yours who lived as a saint and has now died a hero. I
can say with certainty that this simple man is the only saint that I
have ever met in my lifetime.”
During his time in Berlin, Franz was permitted to write only one
letter to Franziska each month, plus a fourth that was written on the
day of his execution. The four letters bear witness to his extraordinary
calm, conviction and even happiness.
Part of the happiness he experienced was thanks to the support he
found in the Catholic chaplain, Fr. Heinrich Kreutzberg. It was a great
consolation for Franz to hear from him that a priest, Fr. Franz
Reinisch, had, just a year earlier, been in the same prison and died a
similar death for similar reasons. After Franz’s death, Fr. Kreutzberg
wrote a long letter to Franziska in which he noted, “I have seen no more
fortunate man in prison than your husband after my few words about
Franz Reinisch.”
Franz’s final letter home was written the morning of his execution.
In it he appeals for the forgiveness of anyone he may have pained and
hurt. He adds: “Dearest wife and mother, it was not possible for me to
free both of you from the sorrows that you have suffered for me. How
hard it must have been for our dear Lord that he had given his dear
mother such great sorrow through his suffering and death! And she
suffered everything out of love for us sinners. I thank our Savior that I
could suffer for him, and may die for him. I trust in his infinite
compassion. I trust that God forgives me everything, and will not
abandon me in the last hour. … And now all my loved ones, be well. And
do not forget me in your prayers. Keep the Commandments, and we shall
see each other again soon in heaven!”
Franz Jägerstätter was a solitary witness. He died with no
expectation that his sacrifice would make any difference to anyone. He
knew that, for his neighbors, the refusal of army service was
incomprehensible — an act of folly, a sin against his family, his
community and even his Church, which had called on no one to refuse
military service. Franz knew that, beyond his family and community, his
death would go entirely unnoticed and have no impact on the Nazi
movement or hasten the end of the war. He would be soon forgotten. Who
would remember or care about the anti-Nazi gesture of an uneducated
farmer? He would be just one more filed-away name among many thousands
who were tried and executed with bureaucratic indifference during in the
Nazi era.
In refusing to change his no to yes, the only thing that Franz could
be sure of was that to betray his conscience would put his immortal soul
at risk.
If the bishops of Austria had done nothing to sanction conscientious
objection, and indeed done a great deal to discourage it, one must note
that Franz did not simply invent the stand he took or did he feel
abandoned by the Church. He drew strength from the sacraments and from
the awareness that he was walking the same path many saints, some in the
recent past, had followed — men and women who had obeyed God rather
than man and paid with their lives for doing so. Before his death Franz
had the profound consolation of learning that a Catholic priest, Fr.
Franz Reinisch, had been held in the very same prison and executed for
similar reasons.
Like all the witnesses who had gone before him, Franz was equipped
with an acute sensitivity to forgotten or neglected notes of the Gospel.
He had read the New Testament countless times and had thought long and
hard about its stories and teachings. Given the war-related questions he
was facing, no doubt it had impressed him that Jesus neither killed
anyone nor called upon anyone to do so.
Aware of such basic Gospel themes and responding to them with
uncompromising courage and faith, Franz in turn has made it possible for
others to hear them too.
In the Franz Jägerstätter narrative, there are two conversion stories.
The first was his own. Franz had been converted from being the sort
of assembly-line Catholic who does what is expected of him within his
native Catholic community into a rarer sort of Catholic who actually
makes a conscious effort to understand the Gospel and to follow Christ
wholeheartedly despite antagonistic social structures prepared to punish
severely anyone who fails to stay in line.
The other conversion occurred within his Church.
Far from being lost in the past, Franz’s witness proved to be a seed
cast in the wind, carried along until a time, nearly two decades later,
when it would it at last take root and find fitting soil. As a
consequence, Franz Jägerstätter helped the Catholic Church change
direction. How providential it was that the story of Franz’s life began
to circulate during the Second Vatican Council and played a part in
giving shape to what the Catholic Church today teaches about war, peace,
conscience and individual responsibility — guidance in stark contrast
to what was taught in Franz’s day: trust your rulers and do as you’re
told — it is no sin to obey.
Nor did Franz’s influence end with a reform of Church teaching about
war and individual responsibility. Half a century after Franz’s death,
the Church had he loved so much, but which had deeply disappointed him,
beatified him. The Church had moved from interest in Franz’s challenging
life to recognizing it as a model of sanctity, a life that rendered
nothing less than a modern translation of the Gospel. “Franz
Jägerstätter,” said Cardinal Christoph Schönborn on the day of Franz’s
beatification, “is a living page of the Gospel. The Gospel is not only
an authoritative report of that which was taking place at that time in
Galilee and in Jerusalem. It is a living book… Franz Jägerstätter was
and is for me the most concrete and illustrative commentary on the
Beatitudes that I have ever heard.”
No one would have been more astonished than Franz to hear himself, or
any conscientious objector, described by the Cardinal of Vienna in such
terms.
Within the cathedral there was resounding applause for Franziska
Jägerstätter, who had lived to hear a solemn declaration read aloud
recognizing as a model of sanctity a man who had once been dismissed as a
model of insanity. Then there was the sight of so many bishops rising
to their feet as a 30-foot banner with Franz’s photo was unfurled. But
perhaps the high point for all present was to witness Franziska, tears
streaming from her eyes, kiss a bronze urn containing some of the
Franz’s ashes before presenting the reliquary to Cardinal Schönborn.
One of the persons missing in the Linz cathedral was Gordon Zahn,
absent due to infirmity (Alzheimer’s disease) and close to death. It was
thanks to Zahn that the name of Franz Jägerstätter had been lifted from
obscurity. For someone’s life to be formally recognized as saintly by
the Church, there must first be at least one person who takes special
note of that life, recognizes its importance, gathers the available
details, and makes it his or her business to bring that life to the
attention of others. In the case of Franz Jägerstätter, Gordon Zahn was
that person. Had he not written In Solitary Witness, it is far from certain that the name of Franz Jägerstätter would be remembered today.
Side by side with Gordon Zahn, we are in debt to an Austrian, Erna
Putz. Building on Zahn’s research, beginning in 1979 she devoted herself
to making Franz better known, obtaining important documents, writing a
full-scale biography of Franz Jägerstätter, and collecting all his
letters and other writings, now gathered together in the book you hold
in your hands.
The impact of Franz’s life was not only on the Second Vatican Council and its final document, The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. The year In Solitary Witness was published, 1964, happened to coincide with the early stages of U.S. military involvement in the war in Vietnam. In Solitary Witness
was widely read by the young men, potential or actual soldiers, who
were struggling with the question of how to respond to that war. Having
been a draft counselor during that period, I can recall how many of
young people I talked with had read Zahn’s book and found themselves
deeply challenged by Franz Jägerstätter’s life. It was one of the
reasons that the Catholic Church in the United States produced so many
thousands of conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War. While none
of them faced the guillotine, many faced prison, exile or other
hardships. How important it was for them to discover that they were not
alone; that someone like Franz Jägerstätter, under far more difficult
circumstances, had read the Gospel as they did and faced the
consequences, despite the incomprehension of their contemporaries.
Franz Jägerstätter remains a challenge, and not only because of his costly refusal to surrender his conscience to the Nazis.
One aspect of that challenge is Franz’s deeply traditional faith, an
example far from fashionable today even among Catholics. While certainly
not unaware of the Church’s human shortcomings and the ways so many
bishops compromise the Gospel in order to be on good terms with
political leaders, Franz Jägerstätter was a grateful Catholic devoted to
the Church and its sacramental and devotional life. It is no minor
detail of his life that he and Franziska began their marriage by going
as pilgrims to Rome, a journey which they could barely afford. No two
people were so often seen at Mass in St. Radegund. Both husband and wife
were devoted to the rosary; in prison Franz prayed the rosary much of
the time. The Jägerstätter household kept all the Church-appointed
fasts. Both Franz and Franziska made frequent use of the sacrament of
confession. It was remembered in St. Radegund that Franz sometimes
paused while at work in the fields in order to pray. He not only served
his parish as sexton, a voluntary and time-consuming responsibility, but
refused to accept any financial rewards offered to him by parishioners
for his role in arranging baptisms, weddings and funerals. Both Franz
and Franziska had a special devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, with
its stress on Christ’s self-giving love for each person. Franz was a
member of the Third Order of St. Francis.
Without doubt the hardest part of saying no to further army service
was Franz’s love of his wife and their children. Franz knew his
execution would make many aspects of life harder for his family,
especially for Franziska, as indeed it did.
While the widows of soldiers won the widespread sympathy of
Austrians, Franziska was shunned. Not only had she lost her husband, but
many of her neighbors tuned their back on her. Some blamed Franz’s
death on her over-zealous religious influence.
When Gordon Zahn interviewed Franziska in 1961, she described with
composure her last meeting with Franz in Berlin three weeks before his
execution, but she broke down in tears while describing the subsequent
behavior of her neighbors. Few offered her the help she so badly needed
after Franz’s death.
In the Nazi period, subsidies and privileges were distributed to
compliant farmers; poor and hard-pressed though she was, none of these
came to her. An application for cement was once rejected as soon as it
was noticed that her family name was Jägerstätter.
Even after the war officials penalized many of those who had opposed
Hitler. In the entire period of rationing, Franziska received no coupons
for clothing or shoes for herself or her children. She knitted clothes
from the wool of angora rabbits.
In post-war Austria, for years she was denied the pension allocated
to war widows. The authorities argued that the legislation compensating
victims only applied to those who had fought for a free and
democratic Austria. This did not include Franz, they argued. Franziska
only won her right to a pension in 1950, after enlisting the help of a
lawyer, Franz’s cousin, Franz Huber.
Yet she bore her difficulties bravely and with unwavering respect for her husband’s stand.
Throughout her life, Franziska Jägerstätter has been a person who
never drew attention to herself. It is only in reading the letters the
couple exchanged that the outsider begins to realize how deep the bond
was between them.
Franz and Franziska loved each other passionately. It was an
extraordinary love, with an all-or-nothing dimension of faithfulness
that had as its foundation their shared love of God. What became clear
to Franz, once he married Franziska, was that he could truly be a
Christian husband and father only to the extent that following Christ
stood at the center of his life. What better love could a man give to
his family than, by his own example, to follow Christ without fear even
to the Cross?
While her neighbors may have over-estimated Franziska’s influence,
she did much to encourage the faith that finally led Franz to martyrdom,
though the stand he took was not something she ever advocated. “In the
beginning,” she once explained, “I really begged him not to put his life
at stake, but then, when everyone was quarreling with him and scolding
him, I didn’t do it any more. … If I had not stood by him, he would have
had no one.”
“I have lost a dear husband and a good father to my children,”
Franziska wrote soon after Franz’s death, “but I can also assure you
that our marriage was one of the happiest in our parish — many people
envied us. But the good Lord intended otherwise, and has loosed that
loving bond. I already look forward to meeting again in heaven, where no
war can ever divide us again.”
After the war Franz’s ashes where brought to St. Radegund and buried
beneath a crucifix by the church wall. Little by little, his grave
became a place of pilgrimage.
Franziska, still a pilgrim herself, celebrated both the 50th and 60th
anniversaries of her wedding by returning to Rome, the city where she
and Franz spent the first days of their marriage.
Perhaps what would have astonished Franz more than anything would
have been to see, among the five thousand people packed into the Linz
cathedral on the day of his beatification, that not only was Franziska
(then 94) present, but their children, grandchildren and
great-grandchildren — sixty family members in all.
Building upon many years of privately shared thoughts on the real benefits of Stoic Philosophy, Liam Milburn eventually published a selection of Stoic passages that had helped him to live well. They were accompanied by some of his own personal reflections. This blog hopes to continue his mission of encouraging the wisdom of Stoicism in the exercise of everyday life. All the reflections are taken from his notes, from late 1992 to early 2017.
I keep seeing people getting excited about the movie on social media, and I keep sharing this as a response.
ReplyDeleteIf nothing else, the film has already introduced him to a lot of new people (myself included).
Let's hope the film does justice to the man. Some might like to paint him as a martyr to an institution, as a member of a special Catholic club, complete with the "smells and bells", as they say.
ReplyDeleteNo, that club left him high and dry. He was a martyr to his conscience, and to God, not to a certain tribe. Our Austrian family knew exactly what that tribe did when the Nazis came. They all suddenly looked the other way.
That crazy man spoke of conscience, and of truth, and of love. Fingers crossed for the film!