Paul Vogt (pastor)
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Paul Vogt (May 23, 1900 – March 12, 1984) was a
Early life
Vogt was born in
In 1936, Vogt left Walzenhausen for a pastorate in Zürich-Seebach, and was appointed leader of the Swiss Protestant Relief Organization for the Confessional Church in Germany (SEHBKD). At the same time, he also co-founded the Swiss Central Office for Refugee Aid (SZF). Between 1933 and 1947, various relief organizations associated with SZF paid out about 70 million Swiss francs to support refugees from the Nazis, especially Jews.[3]
World War II and the Holocaust
In 1943, he took over the refugee office established by the Swiss Evangelical Church Federation, the Protestant-Reformed Landeskirche of the canton of Zürich and the Swiss Ecclesiastical Auxiliary Committee for Evangelical Refugees and thereafter became known as the "Pastor to the Refugees". By that time he was already a very popular preacher and respected theologian. In the fall of 1942, he set up Freiplatzaktion ("Free Place Action") to house 1,700 refugees in private homes free of charge.[4]
News about "deportations to the East" as part of the
Since harsh censorship of the Swiss press by the government did not extend to the Church, Vogt took up the task of publicising Nazi atrocities through sermons, his magazine, and the reproduction of smuggled photographs, which he viewed as his duty as the "voice of the silent and the emissary of the hunted". He particularly attacked the Swiss policy of "refoulement", by which Jewish refugees at the border were handed back to German authorities and near-certain execution.
In 1944, First Secretary of
Pastor Vogt arranged within a few days, through his refugee organization, for thousands of copies of the reports to be made and distributed. He then preached a series of sermons, subsequently published, on the horror of Nazi actions and the complicity of the Hungarian and Swiss governments. One section, quoting Genesis 4:9-10, was noted and repeated in sermons across Switzerland:
Then the Lord said to Cain, "Where is your brother Abel?"
"I don't know,” he replied. "Am I my brother’s keeper?"
The Lord said, “What hast thou done? Behold! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the earth Behold, thy brothers blood cries out to me from the earth." Today, God's scrutinizing and inquiring eyes are focused upon us Christians. And He demands of us, Where, where, where! Where is your brother, the homeless Jew? ... Where are the homeless Jewish children today?
The sermons and the Auschwitz reports were collected into a book, called 'Am I My Brother's Keeper" (Soll ich meines Bruders Hütter sein?"), which included a foreword by Vogt in which he said: "Through these factual accounts, the Christian community is being called to total repentance... We have to be cleansed of any trace of anti-Semitism. In view of the millions of murdered Jews, any further anti-Semitic thought and any mean word is criminal madness."
Vogt's copies of the reports fell into the hands of the Zürich correspondent of The New York Times, Daniel T. Brigham, who wrote two reports in early July on their contents, which represented the first detailed public news stories on the scale of the Holocaust and the functioning of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The first report was titled "Inquiry Confirms Nazi Death Camps", with the subheading "1,715,000 Jews Said to Have Been Put to Death by the Germans Up to April 15". The second was titled "Two Death Camps Places of Horror; German Establishments for Mass Killings of Jews Described by Swiss."
Responding to a letter of thanks from Mantello, Vogt wrote: "We would like to apply all our strength to fight these dreadful things, in order to awaken the [world's] conscience to save those who are still under threat."[7] Vogt ensured that every church in Basel and Zürich named the Hungarian Jews—still being deported—as needing intervention.
The intense Press Campaign, street protests, Sunday sermons led to great pressure on the Hungarian government by President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill and others. It was one of the main factors forcing Hungary's Regent Miklós Horthy to stop the transports to Auschwitz. This allowed for large number of Hungarian Jews to be rescued - many by Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz, Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and other diplomats in Budapest.
After the War
After the war, Vogt campaigned for
References
- ^ "Geschichte - Freiplatzaktion".
- ^ "Sonneblick Home". sonneblick-walzenhausen.ch.
- ^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2019-05-27. Retrieved 2018-04-16.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) - ^ "The "Righteous among the Nations" of Swiss Nationality. Switzerland Task Force".
- ^ The Man Who Stopped the Trains to Auschwitz: George Mantello and Switzerland's Finest Hour, by Dr. David Kranzler, p. 106
- ^ The Man Who Stopped the Trains to Auschwitz: George Mantello and Switzerland's Finest Hour, by Dr. David Kranzler
- ^ The Man Who Stopped the Trains to Auschwitz: George Mantello and Switzerland's Finest Hour, by Dr. David Kranzler, p. 115
- ^ 'Paul Vogt', by Madeleine Lerf, in the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland [1]
- ^ Biography of Paul Vogt [German] in the Archives of Contemporary History of ETH Zürich [2]