Standing up

“News of German atrocities in the war disturbed Franz Jägerstätter deeply, especially the ghoulish happenings at the castle of Hartheim. There, disabled and mentally disturbed patients were being killed because the Nazis considered them ‘unworthy of life’”

Second Reading

Fr Kevin Hegarty

People who defy evil compel our admiration. Take Ingrid Betancourt for example. A Colombian politician who made a stand for democracy and justice, she has just been released after six years as a hostage of the Farc guerrillas whose operation of the drug trade she threatened. She emerged from her ordeal without compromising her grace, her dignity or her beliefs.

After her release, she talked at length of her captivity. The memory of one of her captors is seared on her soul.

He was a small man who had ‘a creative capacity for horror’. Observing him, she could understand ‘the concentration camps’ and all that ‘orgy of torture and physical cruelty’. Franz Jägerstätter would have known intimately what she was talking about. He experienced that malign creativity. Sixty-five years ago the Nazis executed him because he refused to co-operate with them. He endured evil, looked it in the eye and faced it down.

From the outside, which admittedly is a shallow perspective from which to judge anyone, there was nothing remarkable about him, nothing to suggest his name would live on in history.

He was born out of wedlock in the Austrian village of St Radegund in 1907. His parents worked on local farms. His father was killed in the first world war. His mother married a local farmer who adopted Franz and later left him the farm.

In his early twenties he left home to work in the Styrian iron mines for three years. A thoughtful man, with a strong spiritual sense, on his return home he though of becoming a Catholic priest.

However, love joyfully intervened in 1935 when he met Franciska, whom he soon married. They had three daughters. There was something of the ‘new man’ about Franz. At that time men considered pushing a pram as an affront to their masculinity. He was happy to push the pram through the village.

The 1930s were a difficult time in Austria. Hitler had come to power in Germany in 1933. Immediately he set about destabilising democracy in his native Austria, with a view ultimately of annexing the country to Germany.

Franz saw through Nazism and refused to co-operate with it. He left the local voluntary fire brigade when members started to collect money for the Nazi party. He refused state benefits for his children. In 1938, when Hitler arranged a plebiscite on whether Austria should join Germany, he was the only one in his village to vote ‘no’.

A devout Catholic, he received no support from his Church on his lonely stand. The Austrian bishops encouraged people to vote for Hitler’s proposal. They admired his opposition to Communism. One bishop, Justus Rarkauski, by then more in tune with ‘Mein Kampf’ than the bible, went as far as to assert: “It is God Himself who is behind what the Führer commands.”

In October 1940, Franz was compelled to swear loyalty to Hitler and join the Nazi army. After six months he was sent home as farmers were needed to maintain the food supply during the second world war. Perturbed by his experience in the army, he was determined not to capitulate again. He started going to daily Mass to pray for moral guidance.

News of German atrocities in the war disturbed him deeply, especially the ghoulish happenings at the castle of Hartheim. There, disabled and mentally disturbed patients were being killed because the Nazis considered them ‘unworthy of life’.

Two years later came the defining event of his life. Called up again to join the Nazi army, he refused to don the uniform. Relatives and friends pleaded with him to change his mind. So did the local priests. Refusal meant certain death. Think, they said, of your wife and children. His bishop recognised his right to follow his conscience, but pleaded with him to take the easier course.

Franz saw the fear in his eyes. The bishops, he said, ‘don’t really dare to say anything for fear it may be their turn next’.

Events took their inevitable course. Franz Jägerstätter was executed by the guillotine on August 9, 1943.

After the war there was a conspiracy of silence about his extraordinary courage. Austrians, who had collaborated with the Nazis, wanted to forget their dubious moral compromises. His witness was an affront to them.

In the last two decades there have been efforts to honour his memory. Last October Pope Benedict XVI beatified him.

The story of Franz Jägerstätter reminds us that moral witness matters. Sometimes it is a matter of life and death. He knew it. So did a contemporary, Pastor Niemaller, who was imprisoned for his unwillingness to co-operate with the Nazis. He wrote in 1938:

“First they came for the Jews

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Communists

And I did not speak out –

Because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists

Because I was not a trade unionist.

They they came for me –

And there was no one left

To speak out for me.”