Hanns Lilje

Johannes (Hanns) Ernst Richard Lilje (20 August 1899, in Hannover – 6 January 1977, in Hannover) was a German Protestant church leader and later bishop in the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Hanover. In the early post-war years, he became a prominent public figure in West German Protestantism. He also intervened on behalf of several convicted Nazi war criminals, including Erich von Manstein and Paul Blobel, and was involved in Protestant church efforts to obtain clemency in war crimes cases.^[1] He was also involved in a clemency petition for the former Auschwitz commandant Fritz Hartjenstein.^{[2] [3]}

After military service in the First World War, Lilje studied Protestant theology and art history in Göttingen and Leipzig. He was ordained in 1924, served as a student pastor in Hanover from 1925 to 1927, and then became general secretary of the Deutsche Christliche Studentenvereinigung (German Christian Student Association).^[4]

Before 1933, Lilje viewed National Socialism with clear political sympathy. In 1931/32 he wrote that National Socialist participation in government was to be expected and added, "Die Frage, ob das wünschenswert ist, ist mit Ja zu beantworten."(“The question of whether that is desirable must be answered in the affirmative.”)^[5] In 1933 he welcomed the political upheaval as a "new German morning" and linked it to hopes of national and Christian renewal.^[6]

Lilje later became one of the founders of the Jungreformatorische Bewegung, which opposed the church-political programme of the German Christians. The movement, however, did not represent a fundamental rejection of National Socialism: contemporary documentation describes it as opposing the German Christians while also affirming the "new German state" and sharing anti-liberal positions.^[7]

Lilje's conflict with the Nazi regime thus developed primarily over the regime's attempt to subordinate the Protestant churches, not as an early comprehensive rejection of National Socialism as such. Later scholarship has described his criticism of the Nazi state and ideology as limited, even while he was active in church opposition circles.^[8][9]

This ambivalence remained visible during the war. In 1941 Lilje published Der Krieg als geistige Leistung, a text that gave religious meaning to military sacrifice; one of its best-known lines states, "Mit Gott! Nur im Namen Gottes kann man dies Opfer legitimieren." (“With God! Only in the name of God can one legitimize this sacrifice.”)^[10][11]

In 1944 Lilje was arrested after the failed 20 July plot because of contacts to members of the resistance milieu. He remained in Gestapo custody until the end of the war.^[9][12]

After the German surrender in 1945, the Protestant and Catholic churches were among the few large institutions in the western occupation zones that retained organizational continuity and public standing.^[1] Lilje was among the signatories of the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt of October 1945.^[13]

The reception of the declaration in the Hanover church was sharply negative, and leading church figures distanced themselves from it.^[14][15]

One of Lilje's best-documented postwar interventions concerned Field Marshal Erich von Manstein. In post-war West Germany, Manstein was often celebrated as a great strategist and military leader.^[16][17][18] Later research has emphasized his loyalty to Hitler and his participation in the ideological war against the Soviet Union.^[19]

A key document is Manstein's order to the 11th Army of 20 November 1941, which described the war against the Soviet Union as a struggle against the "Jewish-Bolshevik system" and demanded understanding for "hard atonement upon Jewry".^[20] In a post-war letter to his wife, Manstein attempted to distance himself from the order, claiming he could no longer remember it and describing it as a kind of propaganda directive.^[21]

Manstein also appeared as a witness at Nuremberg and was a co-author of the memorandum Das Deutsche Heer von 1920–1945, which historian Manfred Messerschmidt described as one of the most important documents in the later trivialization of the role of the German military leadership in the Second World War.^[22]

In 1949, Manstein was tried by a British military court in Hamburg and sentenced to 18 years' imprisonment for, among other things, the mistreatment and shooting of Soviet prisoners of war and the implementation of criminal orders.^[23]

Lilje publicly demonstrated solidarity with Manstein before and during the proceedings. A note in the church publication Botschaft recorded a visit by Lilje before the trial began,^[24] and archival material shows that he had already been informed about Manstein's situation through a confidential memorandum of the Prisoners of War Commission of the World Council of Churches.^[25] Lilje was also kept informed by General Theodor Busse, a close associate of Manstein and member of the defense team, who sent draft indictments to Lilje's office together with comments challenging the legitimacy of the British court.^[25][26]

According to Manstein's son, Lilje also submitted a clemency petition on Manstein's behalf.^[27] Lilje's intervention was echoed by the church newspaper Sonntagsblatt, which denounced the proceedings as propaganda and, after the verdict, repeated the accusation that the Allied trials amounted to "victors' justice".^[28][29]

Lilje also intervened in cases arising from the Einsatzgruppen trial. The Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units largely composed of members of the Security Police and the SD, followed the German army into occupied Soviet territory and murdered Jews, Communists and other civilians on a mass scale.^[30][31] By April 1942, their shooting detachments had already killed about half a million people.^[32]

From September 1947 to April 1948, 24 former members of the Einsatzgruppen were tried at Nuremberg; 14 of them were sentenced to death.^[33] One of them was Paul Blobel, commander of Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C.^[34] Blobel played a central role in the mass shooting at Babi Yar near Kyiv, where more than 30,000 Jews were murdered on 29 and 30 September 1941.^[32][35] From the summer of 1942 onward, Blobel was also tasked with exhuming and burning bodies from mass graves in order to conceal evidence of mass murder.^[36]

Blobel's death sentence was confirmed in January 1951 by U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy, who commuted many other sentences, and was carried out in June 1951.^[37][33]

Lilje intervened on Blobel's behalf. After Blobel's sister, supported by a pastor and a family counselor, requested help, the bishop's chancellery wrote on 9 February 1951 that Lilje had once again worked for a pardon for the condemned man.^[38] The text of the clemency petition itself has not survived in the cited documentation, but a related letter from Lilje to the Chancellery of the EKD, dated 26 February 1949, does survive. In it, Lilje laid out general principles for handling clemency appeals in capital cases, arguing that the church should support mercy petitions in every case and that death sentences should be carried out only where guilt had been proven beyond doubt, not merely inferred from assumption or probability.^[39]

Lilje also supported clemency petitions for Willy Seibert, Walter Haensch and Franz Six, all of whom had been convicted in the Einsatzgruppen trial.^[1]

Archival material from the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Hanover further indicates that Lilje's office dealt with additional clemency interventions beyond the Manstein and Blobel cases. File LkAH L 3 III Nr. 750 contains correspondence relating to the condemned war crimes prisoner Fritz Hartjenstein, including a 17 March 1950 acknowledgment from the French High Commissioner André François-Poncet that Lilje had drawn attention to the case, as well as later petitions and family appeals sent to Lilje and his chancellery.^[2] Hartjenstein's case has also been described in later literature as one in which a broad network of legal, political and church supporters worked for clemency, including a bishop from Hanover.^[3]

Lilje later wrote in his memoirs that the Stuttgart declaration had attracted attention but had not really initiated a process of rethinking.^[40] He also emphasized the need to move toward closure regarding the German past.^[41]

In 1949, Lilje wrote that the time had come to reach a real conclusion through the "liquidation of our past" and to turn resolutely toward the future.^[42][43]

The article further contrasts Lilje's position with the Darmstädter Wort of the EKD's Council of Brethren of August 1947, which criticized dreams of a special German mission and the attempt to build a "Christian front" with conservative powers.^[44]

Historians have described Lilje's post-war interventions as part of a broader Protestant pattern in the early Federal Republic in which acknowledgments of general guilt coexisted with resistance to the punishment of specific perpetrators.^[1] His role in the Manstein and Blobel cases has been cited in this context in studies of Protestant responses to Nazi crimes and Allied war-crimes trials.^[1]

• Klee, Ernst (1992). Persilscheine und falsche Pässe. Wie die Kirchen den Nazis halfen (3 ed.). Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. ISBN 978-3-596-10956-2.
• Perels, Joachim (1999). Das juristische Erbe des Dritten Reiches. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. ISBN 978-3-593-36318-9.
• von Wrochem, Oliver (1998). "Die Auseinandersetzung mit Wehrmachtsverbrechen im Prozeß gegen den Generalfeldmarschall Erich von Manstein 1949". Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft. 46: 329–353.
• Wunderlich, Axel (2002). "Hanns Lilje und der Umgang mit NS-Verbrechern". In Lutz, Thomas; Niethammer, Lutz (eds.). Nationalsozialismus und Nachkrieg in Norddeutschland. Bremen: Edition Temmen. pp. 187–199.

• Newspaper clippings about Hanns Lilje in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW