Between the Swastika and the Sickle (Prologue)

Between the Swastika and the Sickle

Between the Swastika and the Sickle The Life, Disappearance, and Execution of Ernst Lohmeyer

James R. Edwards

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company Grand Rapids, Michigan

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 4035 Park East Court SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546 www.eerdmans.com © 2019 James R. Edwards All rights reserved Published 2019 Printed in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ISBN 978-0-8028-7618-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

To Melie Seyberth Lohmeyer, beloved wife of Ernst Lohmeyer, who championed his life and preserved his memory

Contents

Prologue

ix

Maps

xv

1. A Posthumous Inauguration

1

2. An Inappropriate Question

7

3. Young Man Ernst

15

4. University Years

26

5. The Great War

40

6. Transplant in Breslau

56

7. Full Bloom in Breslau

77

8. Swastika!

92

9. The Jewish Question

107

10. Battle at Breslau

129

11. Ouster

147

vii

Contents

12. Barbarossa

168

13. New Beginnings

189

14. One against Many

207

15. Years of Silence

225

16. Return to the Posthumous Inauguration

244

17. The Last Letter

263

viii

Abbreviations

277

Notes

279

Bibliography

323

Index

331

Prologue

In 1996 I published an article on the mysterious disappearance and death of Ernst Lohmeyer that appeared just weeks before the fiftieth anniversary of Lohmeyer’s execution, which was commemorated at the University of Greifswald on September 19, 1996. I assumed that the publication of this article would be my only contribution, major or minor, to Lohmeyer scholarship. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent demise of communism, sources related to the life and death of Ernst Lohmeyer that I had pursued in a clandestine manner in East Germany were finally open to all, and it seemed proper to me for Germans themselves to air the story of this remarkable scholar and witness of faith and character. For the next twenty years I transitioned from sometime East German sleuth back to other roles related more directly to my discipline as a professor of New Testament. Lohmeyer himself remained a fixed feature of my mental world, of course, but I had no plans of developing that feature beyond the scope of the 1996 article I had written.

When I retired from full-­time teaching in 2015, two things caused me to change my mind and plunge into a full biography of Ernst Lohmeyer. One was that by 2015 Gudrun and Klaus Otto, Lohmeyer’s daughter and son-­in-­law, had died, as had Professor Günter Haufe, Lohmeyer’s successor as chair of New Testament at the University of Greifswald. Gudrun, Klaus, and Günter had been my three best “informants” on Lohmeyer’s life and fate. Indeed, they were genuine mentors. Their deaths left my unlikely American voice one of the few remaining to tell the Lohmeyer story within

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the context of those who had preserved his memory during the attempted blackout of his name in communist East Germany.

A second awareness, closely related to the above, was perhaps even more compelling in changing my mind. As I mention more than once in the book, the Soviets did not simply kill Ernst Lohmeyer, they sought to expunge all memory of him, “as though he never existed.” Gudrun had reminded me that death is inevitable, but deprivation of honor is not. The first must be accepted, but the second need not—or perhaps better, should not—be accepted.

It became increasingly clear to me that not to tell Lohmeyer’s story was to abet, albeit it unwillingly, the expunging of his memory. At various points in Lohmeyer’s biography I relate my personal endowments that linked me to similar endowments of Lohmeyer.

The determination of the Soviets to expunge his memory seemed to mandate marshaling those endowments to tell a story that deserved to be told but that otherwise might not be told. This latter realization became a virtual call, a necessary counteroffensive to reverse a mendacious victory of those committed to expunging Lohmeyer’s memory. Gudrun noted how her father made a rule not to refuse when asked for help that he could render. My situation conformed too closely to Lohmeyer’s “paradigm” not to apply it to myself.

The theological faculty at the University of Greifswald, thankfully, continues to keep the candle of Lohmeyer’s memory burning. A current member of the faculty there has written his doctoral dissertation on Lohmeyer, and a small but steady stream of academic work and conferences—one of which I note at the beginning of chapter 17—continues to explore Lohmeyer’s significance as a theologian. A particularly pleasing example of this revival is the naming of the new residence of the theological faculty at Greifswald the Ernst Lohmeyer House. The plaque prepared for Lohmeyer’s exoneration on the fiftieth anniversary of his execution on September 19, 1996, now adorns the entryway of the Lohmeyer House, which lies directly across the green from the main hall of the university.

Virtually all resources I used in writing this book, whether written or oral, were German. This was inevitable, for Ernst Lohmeyer was German through and through, and he lived and wrote in an era x

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when far fewer German works were translated into English than is true today. Apart from rare instances of English translations of Lohmeyer’s works, all English translations of German in this book are, by necessity, my own. For those who are interested, I have provided all German originals—whether individual words or entire paragraphs—in the endnotes of each chapter. Readers with even minimal German proficiency will profit from reading Lohmeyer’s lucid, strong, and penetrating German. Within the biography I occasionally place in quotation marks conversations for which I do not provide the original German in endnotes. Most of these conversations are the result of my recall. I make no claim for verbatim accuracy in such conversations, but I wish to assure readers of the veracity of the sense of the conversations, if not of their exact words.

In many instances my recall has been aided by written diaries that I kept in my various peregrinations in Germany. I did not keep written diaries while on Berlin Fellowship (an organization I shall introduce in the story) in East Germany for fear of their being confiscated at border crossings, thereby compromising our German friends in the East. I did, however, commit my itineraries, experiences, and key conversations there to personal diaries after returning to West Germany. The several conversations in chapters 15–16 transpired after the fall of the Wall, and the time lag between event and transcription was reduced to no more than a day, and often to a few hours.

One of the most personally gratifying aspects for me in the Lohmeyer pursuit has been the interplay between the living and the dead, the church militant and the church victorious. That interplay has included voices on both sides of the Atlantic. As noted throughout this book, many Germans have contributed to the Lohmeyer legacy. The foremost among them have been mentioned in the book, especially Gudrun and Klaus Otto and Günter Haufe. I am also indebted to Andreas Köhn’s biography of Ernst Lohmeyer as a New Testament scholar, and his publication of Lohmeyer’s sermons as president of the University of Breslau. But there are others standing in the wings to whom I am also indebted. Ted Schapp, a West Berlin pastor, and Bärbel Eccardt, a West Berlin catechist responsible for “East work” with Berlin Fellowship, both now deceased, nurtured and advanced my understanding of the church in East Germany for xi

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more than two decades. Their counterparts in the East, Gerhard Lerchner (†2018), a pastor in East Germany, and Gerlinde Haker, a catechist at the Lutheran cathedral in the city of Schwerin, both of whom I met through Berlin Fellowship, possessed the rare virtue of demonstrating staunch resistance to oppression yet without vilifying oppressors. Both witnessed to the gospel of reconciliation in a dehumanizing world of East German socialism.

Names associated more directly with the writing of this book are Barbara Peters, who offered prompt and professional assistance to my various requests during her three-­decade tenure in the archive of the University of Greifswald. Similar assistance from Dr. Ingeborg Schnelling-­Reinicke at the Secret Prussian Archive in Dahlem, though of shorter duration, has been equally helpful in securing access to materials crucial to this book. I wish to thank Professor Dr. Christfried Böttrich, who now occupies the chair of New Testament at the University of Greifswald once occupied by Lohmeyer, for his invitation to lecture at a Lohmeyer Symposium in October 2016, and for his expressed advocacy of this book. I am further grateful to both Ingeborg and Christfried for their willingness to read the entire English draft of this book and offer many helpful suggestions for its improvement.

Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to Dr. Julia Otto and Stefan Rettner, grandchildren of Ernst and Melie Lohmeyer, for their continuation of the charitable legacy of their parents Gudrun and Klaus in support of my research into their grandfather, and especially for making all the photographs in this book available for publication.

Americans have been equally important in my Lohmeyer pursuit. Early encouragement for a biography of Lohmeyer came from my friend Gus Lee. Jerry Sittser, Adam Neder, Gerri Beal, Myra and Gary Watts, William Yakely, and my wife, Jane, our daughter Corrie Berg, and our son Mark Edwards have been magnanimous in reading earlier drafts of the work and offering both encouragement and helpful suggestions for changes. Perhaps only an author can appreciate how their advocacy and critiques have refined and improved the manuscript of this book throughout its various stages of gestation and made the work more deserving of its subject.

I wish to express my particular thanks to Eerdmans Publishing Company for its interest in a Lohmeyer biography. Theological pubxii

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lishers are generally reluctant to publish biographies of theologians, and several refuse even to consider submissions in this genre. Trevor Thompson, acquisitions editor at Eerdmans, believed this biography needed to be considered apart from such reservations, that Lohmeyer’s story was not simply one of historical merit but contemporary significance as well. I am grateful for Trevor’s work along with that of his colleagues, Tom Raabe, Jennifer Hoffman, Chris Fann, and Tom DeVries. They have played important roles in moving the biography through the publication process and improving it along the way.

The person to whom and for whom I am most indebted and grateful in the writing of this book is my wife, Jane. She has been familiar with the name of Ernst Lohmeyer since I read a baffling reference to him in the foreword to his Mark commentary in 1974. She has accompanied me in Germany more times than I can count in my endeavor to unravel threads in the Lohmeyer skein. Her willingness to accompany me on Lohmeyer journeys, both physical and mental, over many decades has been unfailingly helpful and has contributed constructively to the outcome of this book.

In the last chapter I speak of the connection that developed between Lohmeyer and myself in the research and writing of this book by means of an analogy of wiring a house, at some point during which the electrical current is switched on. When I accepted a grant from the German Academic Exchange Program in 1993 to investigate the mysterious disappearance and death of Lohmeyer, I took my family with me to Germany, along with Shane Berg, one of my students at the University of Jamestown who is now my son-­in-­law, and Jane Holslag, a former colleague at First Presbyterian Church in Colorado Springs who was then working for Berlin Fellowship.

We all spent Christmas 1993 at Professor Eduard Schweizer’s chalet in Braunwald, a Swiss village high in the Alps that is accessible only by cable car. During the day we skied, but each evening after dinner we stoked the fire in the hearth at Pilgerhuesli—“Pilgrim’s Hut”—and gathered around the dining table to hear of progress in my Lohmeyer research. Thereupon the family transformed itself into a company of quasi detectives in an unsolved crime unit, seeking to piece together the Lohmeyer puzzle. xiii

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Three years later, in 1996, I sat next to Julia Otto, Lohmeyer’s granddaughter, at a dinner reception at the Hotel am Dom in Greifswald following her grandfather’s posthumous inauguration ceremony in the University Great Hall. Julia was interested in knowing how I, an American too young to have known her grandfather personally, became interested in him. In my response I reported that my family was also interested in the Lohmeyer mystery, and I shared the above story of the investigative evening discussions at Pilgerhuesli. Julia took particular delight in this anecdote. Only later in my research did I begin to understand why. Following Loh­meyer’s arrest, his wife, Melie, and two surviving children, Hartmut and Gudrun, spent the remainder of their lives salvaging remnants of their shattered family. So indelible was the experience that Gudrun, wishing to dispel its influence from the family, told Julia and Stefan very little about their grandfather. She did this not out of disinterest or disrespect. Few daughters, in fact, could have been more valiant for their father’s memory. Gudrun moderated her father’s legacy in the family so that Julia and Stefan could develop their lives free from the shadow of his death and defamation. And therein lay, I think, Julia’s delight in my account of Pilgerhuesli: her grandfather’s story was, at last, no longer a cause of sorrow and loss but—for my family, at least—a cause of togetherness and justice and hope.

A second episode occurred in the fall of 2016 at the Secret Prussian Archive. I was working through Lohmeyer’s voluminous correspondence of 1942–1943 in order to determine his itinerary and stations during his military service on the eastern front in Russia. I opened a letter, too casually I fear, and a small flower that Lohmeyer had pressed and sent to Melie from the Russian steppe fell to the floor. I reached down to retrieve it, but his lovely memento, which Melie had equally lovingly preserved for three-­quarters of a century, disintegrated at my touch. The loss of this meek flower filled my heart with sorrow and my eyes with tears. I realized in that moment how closely my life had become bound to Ernst and Melie Lohmeyer, and how the distance of time and space separating us was momentarily closed. Their loss had become mine, and perhaps my tears would have been theirs. A pressed flower from the Russian steppe, lost. May this story give voice to what its fragile beauty represented. xiv