Hanns Kerrl

Kerrl was born into a Protestant family in Fallersleben; his father was a headmaster. He served in the German Army in the First World War as a Leutnant earning the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd Class. He joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in 1923 and soon afterwards went into regional politics. A member of the Sturmabteilung, Kerrl would ultimately hold the rank of SA-Obergruppenführer.

Elected to the Landtag of Prussia in 1928, he became President of the assembly on 24 May 1932 after the Nazis won the largest number of seats in the April election. He remained in this position until the Landtag was finally dissolved on 14 October 1933, in the wake of the Nazi subordination of the German States to the Reich government. After the Nazi seizure of power, Kerrl was appointed Reich Commissioner to the Prussian Ministry of Justice on 23 March 1933 and on 21 April was made Minister of Justice, serving until June 1934. In this position, Kerrl placed a ban on Jewish notaries preparing official documents and banned Jewish lawyers from practicing in Prussia. In September 1933 he was made a member of the Prussian State Council. Kerrl was elected to the Reichstag for electoral constituency 16, South Hanover-Brunswick, in November 1933. When the Reichstag convened on 12 December, he was named First Deputy President to Reichstag President Hermann Goring and would serve in this capacity until his death. On 17 June 1934, Kerrl entered the national Reich cabinet as a Reichsminister without Portfolio.[1]

In the following year, on 16 July 1935, he was appointed Reichsminister für die kirchlichen Angelegenheiten (Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs), to head a newly created ministry. On the one hand, Kerrl was supposed to mediate between those Nazi leaders who hated Christianity (for example Heinrich Himmler) and the churches themselves and stress the religious aspect of the Nazi ideology. On the other hand, in tune with the policy of Gleichschaltung, it was Kerrl's job to subjugate the churches—subject the various denominations and their leaders and subordinate them to the greater goals decided by the Führer, Adolf Hitler. Indeed, Kerrl had been appointed after Ludwig Müller had been unsuccessful in getting the Protestants to unite in one "Reich Church."

Kerrl was considered one of the milder Nazis. Nonetheless, in a speech before several compliant church leaders in 1935, he revealed the regime's growing hostility to the church when he declared, "Positive Christianity is National Socialism." He also pressured most of the Protestant pastors to swear an oath of loyalty to Hitler.

Gregory Munro (Australian Catholic University, Brisbane) states that "Kerrl was the only Minister with an explicit commitment to reach a synthesis between Nazism and Christianity. Much to the ire of leading Nazis, Kerrl maintained that Christianity provided an essential foundation for Nazi ideology and that the two forces had to be reconciled. In the short term, at least, it appears that Hitler hoped to recover the initiative in the Church Struggle by returning to the official NSDAP policy of neutrality. The available documents suggest that Hitler temporized between two approaches to the question of the Churches. On the one hand, the predominant radical elements in the Party wanted to reduce clerical influence in German society as quickly as possible—and by force if necessary. On the other hand, Hitler clearly had much to gain from any possible peaceful settlement whereby the Churches would give at least implicit recognition to the supremacy of Nazi ideology in the public realm and restrict themselves solely to their internal affairs.

"In 1935 Kerrl scored some initial successes in reconciling the differing parties in the Church Struggle. However, by the second half of 1936, his position was clearly undermined by NSDAP hostility, and by the refusal of the churches to work with a government body which they regarded as a captive or stooge of the Nazi Party. Hitler gradually adopted a more uncompromising and intolerant stance, probably under the growing influence of ideologues such as Bormann, Rosenberg and Himmler, who were loath to entertain any idea of the new Germany having a Christian foundation even in a token form."[2]

Increasingly marginalized by Hitler, who did not even grant him a personal conversation,[3] Kerrl became desperate and embittered. A completely powerless minister, he died in office on 14 December 1941, aged 54. He was succeeded by Hermann Muhs.

The American diplomat, William Russell wrote in his memoir (Berlin Embassy) that Kerrl frequented "Berlin dives" and bars "until the wee hours of the morning".[4]

Kerrl once dubbed Hitler 'Germany's Jesus Christ'.[5]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Hanns Kerrl.

• John S. Conway: The Nazi Persecution of the Churches 1933–1945 (London, 1968).

• Newspaper clippings about Hanns Kerrl in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW
• Literature by and about Hanns Kerrl in the German National Library catalogue