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The author examines the efforts of Germany's Catholic fraternities to stake their claim to the legacy of Albert Leo Schlageter. The centrality of the Schlageter mythology to Nazism is well reported. After his execution by French occupation authorities in the Rhineland on May 26, 1923, Schlageter would be celebrated by the Nazi party at the time and later as "The First Soldier of the Third Reich." Less well known is the attempt of Germany's Catholic fraternities to lay their claim to the fallen Schlageter, who had at one time been a member of Germany's largest Catholic fraternity. In their publications and memorials, Catholic fraternity brethren insisted that Schlageter be celebrated as a Catholic hero. They conversely denied any connection between their fallen fraternity brother and Nazism, no doubt aware that, through the Weimar period, their episcopal authorities had prohibited Catholics from belonging to the Nazi party or any affiliate organizations. How Germany's Catholic fraternities attempted to accommodate their Schlageter legacy to a changed state of affairs when Adolf Hitler came to power in early 1933 reveals much about the broader dilemmas faced by Germany's Catholics at this time.
Keywords: Albert Leo Schlageter; German Catholic fraternities; German Catholicism; National Socialism; Weimar Germany
On May 26, 1923, on the outskirts of Düsseldorf, a twelve-man firing squad belonging to a French occupation army executed Albert Leo Schlageter, a German veteran of World War I, a holder of the Iron Cross, and a former member of the Freikorps. Earlier in the month, a French mil- itary tribunal had condemned Schlageter to death, after Schlageter and conspirators belonging to a former Freikorps unit had attempted to sabotage the delivery of coal from the occupied German Ruhr region to France.1 The French occupation of the Ruhr, which transpired after the German government had failed to meet the reparations obligations demanded by the Versailles peace settlements, was condemned throughout Germany, thus making Schlageter's actions widely popular with the German people. Schlageter's execution provoked a public outcry throughout Germany that raged for years. In 1931, with the foreign occupation of German territory at an end, a national committee supervised the erection of a monument in Schlageter's honor at the site of his execution in Düsseldorf.2 The ceremony dedicating the monument became a...