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Karl Friedrich Stellbrink
© Erzbistum Hamburg - Geschäftsstelle Lübecker Märtyrer

Karl Friedrich Stellbrink * 1894

Holstenglacis 3 (Untersuchungsgefängnis) (Hamburg-Mitte, Neustadt)

1942 verhaftet
enthauptet 10.11.1943

see:

further stumbling stones in Holstenglacis 3 (Untersuchungsgefängnis):
Heinz Jäkisch, Bernhard Jung, Karl-Heinz Keil, Hermann Lange, Eduard Müller, Johann Odenthal, Johannes Prassek, Rudolf Schöning, Walter Wicke, Walerjan Wróbel

Karl Friedrich Stellbrink, b. 10.28. 1894 in Münster, Westphalia, jailed 4.7.1942, executed 11.10.1943 in the Hamburg Remand Center

Holstenglacis 3 (at the front of the Remand Center)

Karl Friedrich Stellbrink was born the second son of Chief Customs Secretary Carl Stellbrink and his second wife Helene, née Kirchoff, in Münster, Westphalia. In March 1913, after having attended elementary school and the preparatory high school in Detmold, he finished his schooling at the Evangelical Johannes Institute in Berlin-Spandau, graduating with an intermediate certificate; he then turned to theology. In Soest, Karl Friedrich attended the "Preachers in Foreign Lands Seminar.” His studies were interrupted by the First World War.

In 1915, he volunteered for the Grenadier Guards Regiment and fought on the Western Front. In 1917 he was severely wounded in the left hand by a "dum-dum bullet.” He was discharged from the service on 30 September 1917. He received the Iron Cross Second Class and then resumed his studies. In 1920, he took his final examination at the Soest Preachers’ Seminar.

In 1921, Karl Friedrich Stellbrink was ordained to the spiritual office of the Overseas Service of the Prussian Evangelical State Church; with his wife, the elementary school teacher Hildegard, née Dieckmeyer (b. 10.19.1895), whom he had married on 5 March 1921, he traveled, as the pastor for German settlers, to the Rio Grande do Sul in southern Brazil. Three of their children were born there: Gerhard (b. 6.13.1922), Gisela (d. March 1923), and Gisela (b. 3.29.1925). A further child, Waltraut (1.7.1928) was born in Mont Alverne near Santa Cruz. The Stellbrink family returned to Germany in 1929.

Karl Friedrich assumed the ministry in the Steindorf region of Thuringia and took into his family the ten and twelve year old sons, Ewald and Hugo, of his sister Irmgard Heiss, who had taken ill.

The personality of Karl Friedrich Stellbrink is not without its controversies because, after his return, and like many who observed the political developments in Germany only from abroad, he welcomed National Socialism.

After five years in Steindorf, Karl Friedrich assumed the pastorate of the Lübeck Luther Church, whereupon he quickly fell into conflict with the Nazi Party, as his wife later reported: Soon after the Nazis took power, he became disappointed and angered by the increasingly "conscience-less activities” of the Party.

In 1936, there came a summons from the Gestapo, and in 1937, a legal proceeding led to his expulsion from the National Socialist Party. "In the following period, my husband fell into continuously mounting conflicts with the National Socialist Party and the regime. He expressed his opposition and his opinion everywhere and at every opportunity. Whether it was the youth organizations which, because of his confirmands, he was constantly embroiled in conflict, whether it was against the National Socialist ordinances in the schools, or in conversations with congregants - my husband criticized with utmost intensity and stridency and was firmly convinced that all the means at the disposal of men should be used to put an end to this totalitarian regime as soon as possible.”

By the beginning of the war, he was a determined opponent of National Socialism. Since the summer of 1941, the evangelical pastor stood in close connection to the Catholic clergymen of the Lubeck Heart of Jesus Church, around Johannes Prassek, Hermann Lange, and Eduard Müller (see their biographical entries). With young clergy, they discussed critically the National Socialist regime and the war situation; they distributed the sermon of Bishop von Galen against the murder of the ill. On the Saturday before Palm Sunday 1942, Lübeck was the target of a British air raid.

Hildegard Stellbrink reported that after the war began her husband was spied upon many times, including his Palm Sunday sermon. "My husband had, on the previous night, devoted all his strength to help extinguish fires in the neighborhood; as soon as the all-clear was given, he rode his bike through the destroyed parts of his community to help and to comfort. On this occasion and in his Palm Sunday sermon on the following morning, my husband gave voice to what his Christian convictions demanded of him: that this night had been a divine call for the people to repent. Under the influence of events, this statement was transformed in no time into the words "God’s judgment,” and coursed through the whole city like wildfire. This Palm Sunday sermon provided the pretext for my husband’s arrest.

The state church initiated dismissal proceedings. When the Gestapo came to arrest Karl Friedrich Stellbrink on 3 April 1942, he lay, according to his biographer Else Pelke, in bed with a fever. After his recovery, he turned himself in to the officials on 7 April 1942 and did not return home. Karl Friedrich was taken in "protective custody” to the Lauerhof Prison in Lübeck. After his arrest, the three Catholic clergymen, Lange, Müller, and Prassek, and a further 18 laymen were also taken into custody. Ten days later, Hildegard Stellbrink received a visitor’s permit. "I scarcely recognized my husband. He appeared to have been mishandled in the extreme and tortured. I never found out what physical pain had been inflicted upon him during his time in prison, but it was plain to see that he had been tortured.”

Karl Friedrich could have been under no illusions that his trial would end in his execution. Adolf Ehrmann, a member of the council of administrators of the Catholic community and a co-defendant, decisively refused to give the diplomatic answer to "the truth, and nothing but the truth,” by denying and remaining silent.

On 23 June 1943, in the so-called Lübeck Christians trial, Karl Friedrich Stellbrink was condemned to death by the People’s Court, which had traveled from Berlin to Lübeck, on grounds of "subversion of national defense,” "treasonous abetting of the enemy,” and "violations of the radio broadcasting law.”

The Lübeck pastorate, on 9 July 1943, sent a plea for mercy, along with supporting psychological documentation, to the minister of justice. It argued that "execution of a former pastor would bring shame upon the profession.” The documentation attributed to the "notorious grumbler” an inability to think and judge bordering on madness. No notice of it was taken.

Karl Friedrich Stellbrink was guillotined on 10 November 1943 in the Hamburg remand prison and cremated in Ohlsdorf crematorium. The urn with his earthly remains rests today in the Lübeck Luther Church. Since 1988, a memorial tablet in the wall of the remand prison at the former Hamburg ramparts recalls the four "Lübeck Pastors,” and a street is named after Karl Friedrich Stellbrink in the Neu Allermöhe quarter.

The beatification of the three Catholic clergymen, Hermann Lange, Eduard Müller, and Johannes Prassek, took place on 25 June 2011 before the Heart of Jesus Church in Lübeck. Karl Friedrich Stellbrink was not forgotten during these solemnities.

In May 2011, for his sister, Irmgard Heiss, née Stellbrink (b. 4.6.1897 in Münster), a commemorative stone was placed in Detmold before her parental home at Hubertusstrasse 10. She belonged to the victims of the "euthanasia program” during the National Socialist regime. Irmgard Heiss had been committed to various psychiatric institutions. On 26 January 1941, she was sent from the Lengereich Provincial Psychiatric Hospital to the Weilmünster Psychiatric Hospital. On 3 October 1944, weakened by neglect and bad living conditions, she died of tuberculosis in the Lindenhaus/Brake Institute in Weilmünster.

Translator: Richard Levy
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: June 2020
© Susanne Rosendahl

Quellen: StaH 332-5 Standesämter 1167 u 734/1943; StaH 242-1 II Gefängnisverwaltung II, Ablieferung 1998/1; StaH 242-4 Kriminalbiologische Sammelstelle 998; Pelke: Christenprozess; Voswinkel: Geführte Wege; Schneider/Lutz: Erfasst, S. 156–160; http://www.spielraum-fuer-kunst.de/?page_id=15 (Zugriff 29.11.2016); Archiv der Hansestadt Lübeck, 05.5 Familienarchiv und Nachlässe, Stellbrink, Karl Friedrich, http://www.stadtarchiv-luebeck.findbuch.net/php/main.php?ar_id=3730#30352e35205374656c6c62 72696e6b2c204b61726c20467269656472696368x20 (Zugriff 29.11.2016); Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand, http://www.gdw-berlin.de/vertiefung/biografien/personenverzeichnis/biografie/view-bio/karl-friedrich-stellbrink/?no_cache=1 (Zugriff 16.3.2016); http://www.unitas-ruhrania.org/index.php?page= 126 (Zugriff 16.3.2016); http://www.luebeckermaertyrer.de/de/index.html (Zugriff 16.3.2016).

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