07/09/2020
It's time for a little LGBTQ history. And a small piece of justice that shows what real Christian compassion looks like. Pink News and the German international broadcaster Deutsche-Welle report that a protestant denomination called the Immanuelkirche has reinstated the memory and status of a gay hero priest who attempted to use his leverage within the Nazi Party and Christian communities to defend those who were suffering at the hands of one of history's most notoriously murderous regimes. The Reverend Frederich Klein was only one of thousands of gay and bi men or gender non conformist people who suffered at the hands of the Nazi state, the dictatorship based on eugenic ideas which controlled Germany between January 1933 and their total defeat in 1945, which occupied most of Europe, killed millions of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, communists and Slavs, and precipitated the Second World War, leading directly to the deaths of around fifty million other people in atrocities that are even now horrifying historians. Reverend Klein was born in 1905, and early in his career saw himself as a loyal German patriot, even joining the Nazi Party of Adolf Hitler. But after moving to Berlin in the middle thirties, he began to doubt the wisdom of his association with such a regime, which even before the Second World War, was engaged in cruel acts against the disabled, people with learning difficulties and so on. He struck up a friendship with an independent Christian clergyman called Johannes Schwartzkopf, who was involved in subtle but important work against the Nazis. Remember, this was a dangerous occupation, because the Nazis wanted control of all aspects of life – reading free newspapers, listening to overseas broadcasts and questioning Nazi ideology in any way quickly became a death sentence. Klein supported Reverend Schwartzkopf's work in the anti-Nazi movement. By 1942, the Nazi paranoia about homosexuality had reached heights which would be farcial if they were not so dangerous for so many thousands of gay men. Even a look of desire between males could be punished with death, according to esteemed historian of the era, Richard Plant. Reverend Klein's sexuality earned him a prison sentence in a brutal military jail, whilst his church removed his rights as a priest. By 1944, with the Nazi state beginning to crumble, the dictatorship refused to give up, instead arming elderly men and teenage boys to replace the millions of young men they had sent to their deaths. Reverend Klein was sent to the Eastern Front, where some of the worse killing fields in the Second World War existed. Even today, mass graves are being excavated and Deutsche-Welle Television supposes that Reveren Klein met his demise along with millions of others somewhere in what is now the plains of Western Russia. The Immauelkirche's rehabilitation of Reverend Klein was marked with a socially distanced service attended by around ninety mostly elderly gay and bisexual men. "Revoking the ordination rights of Reverend Friedrich Klein on January 20, 1943, has been recognized as an injustice and is declared null and void," Protestant Berlin Bishop Christian Stäblein told the congregation. The Berlin based church says that the acceptance of past injustice against the Reverend Klein is just the beginning of an ongoing process. The church group's official responsible for the culture of remembrance, Marion Gardei, says that the church wants "to continue pursuing the rehabilitation of all homosexual victims." They intend to do more research, to prepare a theological statement on the issue, and to set up an advice body for present-day complaints or queries.
https://www.dw.com/en/how-a-church-in-germany-posthumously-reinstated-a-...
https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2020/09/03/friedrich-klein-reverend-gay-disro...
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Klein_(Pfarrer,_1905)
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/the-men-with-the-pink-tri...
