Boegner Marc

Boegner, Pastor Marc File 2698 In May 1941, Pastor Marc Boegner, president of the Protestant church in France, became the first leading French cleric to protest the antisemitic laws of the Vichy regime, explicitly and officially. In 1940, Boegner became head of CIMADE, a Protestant relief organization that acted on behalf of Jews incarcerated in concentration camps in France. In 1942, Boegner and Cardinal Pierre Marie Gerlier (q.v.) served as honorary presidents of Amitié Chrétienne, an organization set up to support French Jewry. Boegner supported and encouraged Protestant ministers and many active laypeople to rescue Jews, and his prestige lent great impact to his statements. Thanks to Boegner, Protestant communities sheltered thousands of Jews, primarily in Lyons, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, and the départements of Lozère, Gard, Drôme, and Tarn. Many others were smuggled into Switzerland with the help of Protestant ministers who worked in border areas under Boegner’s influence and inspiration. Starting in the summer of 1941, Boegner maintained personal contact with the Vichy leadership—Marshal Pétain, Prime Minister Pierre Laval and Commissioner of Jewish Affairs Xavier Vallat. In his talks with them, Boegner condemned the regime’s antisemitic policies and sought to have the anti-Jewish decrees rescinded. In a stormy meeting with Laval in the summer of 1942, Boegner vehemently protested the intention to deport Jewish children to camps in the east and the inhumane character of these measures. On September 6, 1942, during the annual Assemblée du Désert at the Mas Soubeyran, in the département of Gard, Boegner preached to more than sixty parsons and urged them to rescue Jews. This courageous attitude earned him many enemies. In the summer of 1941, the radical antisemitic weekly Au Pilori began to castigate Boegner’s activity and to demand that he be prosecuted. Beecause of his courageous deeds on behalf of the Jews, Marc Boegner risked his life and liberty, likeother Protestant ministers, some of whom were arrested and deported. He was personally involved in the rescue of approximately one hundred German Jewish children who had been interned at the Gurs concentration camp in southern France. With the help of others, he helped hide the children when the gendarmerie was about to deport them to Auschwitz. Thus, the children’s lives were saved. In 1940, the Strauss family, French-born Jews, reached the city of Nîmes in the unoccupied zone, where Boegner moved in 1941. In November 1942, after the Germans extended their occupation to the Vichy zone, M. Strauss asked Boegner for his help. The minister received him warmly and sent his family to the city of Montélimar, where he arranged a hiding place for them. In 1943, when the Strausses had to move again, Boegner sent them to the Protestant seminary in Collonges, in the département of Haute-Savoie near the Swiss border, where they found refuge until the liberation in August 1944. Through his resolute opposition to Vichy collaboration with Germany and his support of the rescue of French Jewry—which he advocated fearlessly to those at the head of the regime—Boegner had a profound influence on the French Protestant clergy. As a result, thousands of Jews indirectly owe their survival to him. On November 26, 1987, Yad Vashem recognized Pastor Marc Boegner as Righteous Among the Nations.