Brass Tacks: Martyr’s Day

This August marks the 58th anniversary of the execution of Franz Jägerstätter, the only man in his Austrian village to vote in 1938 against the unifying of his country with Hitler’s Germany. Five years later, on August 9, 1943, Jägerstätter, who was also the only man in his village to refuse to fight in Hitler’s war, lost his life. His death by guillotine took place in a military prison in Berlin, shrouded in loneliness and ignominy, the Nazi punishment for draft-dodgers.

Today, his grave in St. Radegund in Upper Austria is a shrine, a place of pilgrimage. Every year, on the anniversary of his death, hundreds of Austrians and foreigners alike walk from St. Radegund to the parish church in the nearby town of Ostermiething to honor his memory.

Jägerstätter was born out of wedlock in 1907; his parents, both servants, were too poor to get married. His father was later killed in World War I, and his mother married a local farmer, who adopted young Franz. He was a handsome, rowdy youth whose chief pastimes were drinking, fighting, and having a good time. He was the first person in St. Radegund to own a motorcycle, and one of the few extant photographs of him depicts a wiry, grinning young man astride his bike. At age 26, Jägerstätter fathered an illegitimate child of his own, a daughter. Three years later, in 1936, he married a different young woman, settled down on his own farm, and had three more daughters.

Jägerstätter was not a pacifist, nor was he much of an Austrian patriot. And he was certainly not religious— until sometime before his marriage, when he began to read the gospels and to attend Mass frequently. The 1930s were the worst of times in Austria, as popular support steadily swelled for Hitler’s bizarre cocktail of virulent nationalism and racial “folk” consciousness. The Austrian bishops issued a pastoral letter in March 1938 telling Catholics that it was their duty to vote for the Anschluss, the German-Austrian union, as a bulwark against the atheistic communism of the Soviet Union.

Jägerstätter took his stand against the Anschluss and against service in Hitler’s army because he believed that the German war of aggression was wrong, and that the Nazi system, which was already exterminating the unfit as a prelude to exterminating Jews, was evil, as evil as Bolshevism.

“If someone becomes ineducable and might be a burden on the state, what happens to them?” he wrote in one of many anguished journal entries and letters to family and friends. His parish priest, who was later arrested by the Gestapo, supported his decision. His mother and his wife, Franziska, did not, although they did not desert him, either.

Finally, in 1943 came the call-up order. It could end in only one place for Jägerstätter. He was not tortured, but in a gruesome Nazi signature touch, he was required to lie facing the guillotine as its blade sliced down. Exactly a year before, on August 9, 1942, St. Edith Stein had been gassed at Auschwitz with her fellow Jews.

After the war ended in 1945, Franziska Jägerstätter carried her husband’s ashes from Berlin to St. Radegund and had them buried in the graveyard abutting the village’s onion-domed 15th-century church. The postwar years were not pleasant for her and her daughters. Nearly every family in Upper Austria had a son, a brother, or a father who had died or been wounded or maimed on the eastern front, and some of her neighbors told her that her husband had “betrayed” his people.

Then, during the 1960s, the raw memories and the bitterness began to abate, and the pilgrims started to come. There is now hardly a moment when the grave of Franz Jägerstätter, surmounted by a traditional Austrian roofed crucifix, is not blanketed with flowers. There are several books about him, but the most moving account of his life to my mind is in John Lukacs’s The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age (1993). Lukacs quotes the French Catholic poet Charles Peguy: “The true revolutionaries of the twentieth century will be the fathers of Christian families?’

There have been no official Church proceedings to canonize Franz Jägerstätter. I talked about this with Kenneth Woodward, religion editor of Newsweek and author of Making Saints: How the Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes a Saint, Who Doesn’t, and Why (1990). “People forget that it’s up to the local bishops to begin the canonization process,” said Woodward, who attributes the omission to a lingering state of denial over the Austrian hierarchy’s support for the Anschluss.

No matter. This year, as the shooting stars of August crisscross the Austrian sky, the pilgrims will again make their walk in St. Radegund, because martyrs live, while dictators die.

I will light a candle myself: This August 9 marks the first anniversary of my father’s death last year. He was born in 1907, the year of Jägerstätter’s birth. May the martyrs of August 9— Franz and Edith and all the rest from the 20th century whose names we’ll never learn pray for his soul, and for all of ours.

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