MARTYRED
PASTOR GUSTAW MANITIUS HONORED IN POLAND
by Tom Imhoof
On November 19, 2000 a ceremony held in Poznań, Poland,
honored the grandfather of Redeemer
member Andre Manitius,
Pastor Gustaw Manitius (1880-1940), a Lutheran pastor
and bishop who was martyred by the Nazis. A city park
was dedicated in honor of Pastor Manitius, and a cross
which had belonged to him was returned to his church.
(See photograph in the online
photo Gallery).
Pastor Manitius was honored for the courage and dedication
of his service to the Lutheran community in Poznań, and for
the faith that empowered him to resist the Nazis regardless
of the cost to himself of doing so. His memory survived
among Lutherans in Poland after 1940, indeed after World
War II. Plaques honoring him were placed in churches in
Warsaw, Bielsko, Łodz, and Poznań, and the Poznań church’s
current pastor, Tadeusz Raszyk, led a long-running campaign
to name a street or a park for him in Poznań. It became
possible to honor this hero only after the collapse of
communism. The commemoration of Pastor Manitius last
November also served as a partial compensation for the
difficulties which Lutherans in Poland (along with other
Christians) experienced under the communist regime after
World War II.
His was a witness among many during the twentieth century
of the absolute need for faith in God to enable people to
do what is right even in the face of the comprehensive
evils of totalitarianism. He left us a shining example of
the power of God to overcome such evils, which we have also
seen in our own time.
Pastor Manitius was born February 7, 1880, in Konstantynów
near Łodz in Poland. His ancestors had emigrated to that
area from Hungary in the 16th century. His grandfather had
been presiding bishop of the Lutheran Church in Poland. In
1924 Pastor Manitius moved to Poznań, where he eventually
became bishop of the Poznań-Pomeranian District of the
Augsburgian (Lutheran)-Evangelical Church. Already marked
as an enemy by the Nazis, he was arrested by the Gestapo on
October 9, 1939, barely a month after World War II had
begun. He was subsequently murdered by them during the
night of either January 28 or 29, 1940.
The existence of a Lutheran community in this region of
Poland is a matter of great historical interest in view of
the fact that one author who shared Pastor Manitius’
experience of imprisonment by the Gestapo in Poznań
attributed a high degree of anti-Nazi heroism to the
Lutherans living there. Father Edward Frankiewicz, a Roman
Catholic priest who was actually one of Pastor Manitius’s
cellmates, noted in his memoir of this period that Lutheran
pastors living in the region were the bravest of the Nazis’
opponents there. (Edward Frankiewicz, Człowiek poza
nawiasem [The man beyond the Pale] (Warsaw : Pax,
1955)).
The city of Poznań and its surrounding province formed a
portion of what the Germans called the Warthegau or
Wartheland. The name derived
from the name of the region's principal river, the
Warta (Warthe in German). Originally part of Poland,
Poznań became the Prussian province of Posen under the
Second Partition of
Poland in 1793 . There were ethnic Germans living
in the province even before the Second Partition, but
after 1793 German settlement increased significantly.
Most of the new settlers were Lutherans, and many
Protestant parishes were established. Most of the
region was restored to Polish control after World War
I, and by 1920 most of the Germans living there had
re-emigrated back to Germany. On the eve of World War
II, about 35 percent of the population (approximately
325,000 persons) was of German origin.
In keeping with one of Hitler's principal war aims, the
acquisition of Lebensraum or a "living space"
for Germans to the east, the Nazis made the Warthegau
a test case of how their settlement policies might
unfold in future conquered eastern territories. Under
Gauleiter Arthur Greiser they sought not only to
subjugate the Polish population and resettle Germans
to the region, but also to effect a complete
separation of the state from the Catholic Church, and
the “coordination” all churches within the province to
the service of their purposes.
This effort included a thoroughgoing assault on the
Lutheran Church in Poznań, and it was as a result of that
assault that Pastor Manitius was eventually martyred for
his faithfulness. According to some accounts, the Nazis
presented Pastor Manitius with a choice this man of faith
could not accept: either become a Volksdeutscher (an ethnic
German naturalized as a subject of the German Reich),
collaborate in making the Lutheran Church in the region an
instrument of Nazi rule, and preach his sermons only in the
German language; or suffer the consequences of refusing to
collaborate in the Germanization of the area. If Pastor
Manitius had accepted and collaborated, he would probably
have survived the war. But neither his faith, nor his sense
of honor, nor his intense Polish patriotism permitted him
to make that choice. Instead, he refused to assist the
Nazis in any way. For this act of faith and courage he was
interned in a concentration camp and brutally murdered
shortly thereafter.
The general circumstances of his death, though often
repeated with variations in other cases in Nazi-occupied
Eastern Europe, are not as familiar to us as they ought to
be, because Americans are not as familiar with history of
Eastern Europe as they might be. These circumstances of
brutality and lawlessness are instructive in their own
right. Remembering them honors the victims in an important
way, and reminds us powerfully of the inhumanity to which
absence of faith all too often leads.
The city of Poznań is surrounded by a ring of defensive
fortifications. One of them, Fort VII, became the
German concentration camp for the area. Pastor
Manitius was imprisoned at Fort VII, and murdered
there. In his book Father Frankiewicz wrote about the
night of January 28 (or 29), 1940, the following:
"The [SS guards were] celebrating the achievement of power
by Hitler’s party [Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor of
Germany, January 30, 1933]…. Enraged crowds were opening
the cells like cages with wild animals. They called the
prisoners out and amused themselves by mistreating them
sadistically…. In our cell we stood at attention in two
rows. The guard called my neighbor, Pastor Manitius. He
left instantly without a cap, without a jacket, in socks
only…. [He] never returned to the cell. After two days his
food parcel, his clothing, and his personal items were
distributed [to the other prisoners]." (pages 22-23)
Father Frankiewicz’s account implies that Pastor Manitius
was severely beaten, then forced to run through a corridor
of the fort (as though attempting to escape), and shot to
death by the SS. The usual practice at Fort VII was that SS
guards would report such deaths in the words “Auf der
Flucht verschossen” – shot while trying to escape. He had
committed no crime. He had been afforded no trial. He was
killed simply because of his opposition to Nazi policies,
and because of his devotion to the independence of Poland.
His body was never found, but according to Father
Frankiewicz later that night bodies were loaded onto a
truck and driven away, in all probability to the site of a
mass grave in a nearby forest. His wife learned what had
happened to him only in the Spring of 1940, from a prisoner
who had just been released from Fort VII. She and her son
were expelled from Poznań by the Germans shortly
afterwards.
The service honoring Pastor Manitius on November 19 was
conducted by Bishop Szarek, the presiding bishop of the
Lutheran Church in Poland, and attended by local
parishioners, Catholic and Jewish representatives, Lutheran
pastors from as far away as Hamburg and Amsterdam, Polish
Lutheran pastors, and representatives of the city and
provincial governments of Poznań. It was held on the 80th
anniversary of the reopening of the Poznań Lutheran parish
after the end of World War I. Bishop Szarek in his sermon
compared the Poznań parish with the early Christian
assembly in Smyrna (in modern Turkey) for the similarities
in the challenges and persecutions each of these Christian
communities endured. Before moving to the outdoor
dedication of the park named in Pastor Manitius’s honor,
Bishop Szarek returned to the Poznań church’s Pastor Raszyk
a gold chain and cross which had belonged to Pastor
Manitius and had been given to the Bishop by the Manitius
family in 1991. The Gustaw Manitius Park which Bishop
Szarek consecrated will include a memorial marker giving
information about Pastor Manitius and his martyrdom.