Grueber Heinrich

Grüber, Propst (Dean) Heinrich Heinrich Karl Ernst Grüber was born at Stolberg in the Rhineland in 1891. His father was a schoolteacher, and his mother was Dutch. He studied theology at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands and spoke Dutch fluently. Following front-line service as a volunteer in the German artillery in World War I, he was ordained as a Protestant clergyman in Berlin in 1920. In early 1933, while serving as the director of the church school in Waldhof at Templin (Uckermark), he joined the Nazi party. However, his flirt with the Nazi party was a short-lived affair. Already during the first months after Hitler’s assumption of power, Grüber aligned himself with the dissident circles in the Protestant church. He joined the ranks of Pfarrernotbund, the Emergency Association for Protestant Pastors, established in September 1933, by Pastor Martin Niemöller (who had undergone a similar process of early disillusionment with Hitler) in protest against the introduction of the “Aryan Paragraphs” (the racially discriminating clauses of Nazi legislation) into the Church. Pfarrernotbund served as rallying ground for the Confessing Church, the seceding, minority wing of German Protestantism, which stood apart from the conformist majority in its determined opposition to the so-called German Christians and their attempt to force the Church and Christian theology into line with Nazi racial doctrines. As a result of his dissenting sympathies, Grüber fell foul of the Nazis and lost his job as director of the church school at Waldhof. However, in February 1934 – not without some sharp political maneuvering – the Rhinelander’s supporters succeeded in turning the tables on his opponents and got him appointed as pastor in Kaulsdorf, the eastern suburb of Berlin. This somewhat backwater, working-class community, which Grüber had painstakingly wrested from Nazi control, became, under his energetic leadership, a stronghold of the Confessing Church. At the sametime, he also assumed responsibility for the spiritual welfare of the Berlin Dutch community. Coupled with his intimate familiarity with the Netherlands, this well-connected position at once brought him into contact with the Berlin Jews and their early emigration plans. Meanwhile, the deteriorating plight of the Protestant Christians of Jewish descent was becoming the cause of increasing concern to the Confessing Church, and especially to Grüber’s colleague from Heidelberg, Pastor Hermann Maas*. Ostracized as Jews by the official Protestant Church and, at the same time, excluded as non-Jews by the Jewish welfare organizations, the lot of the so-called “non-Aryan Christians” – many of them second-generation converts to Christianity – was, if anything, even more hopeless than that of the rank-and-file, non-converted Jews. In 1937 the top, non-official leadership of the Confessing Church – as it had been banned since October 1935 – commissioned Grüber to begin preparations for the establishment of a central relief agency for Protestant Christians of Jewish descent. This was the origin of the famous Büro Grüber (the Grüber Bureau), which was opened in the Berlin Mitte just three weeks after the November 1938 pogrom. The first offices were located at 20 Oranienburgerstrasse, in a building bequeathed by the British Missionary Society “Hebrew Christian Testimony.” In October 1939, the bureau moved to An der Stechbahn, the historic site of the medieval city castle. With secondary branches and representatives spread throughout the Reich, it soon became one of the most significant rescue and relief centers for racially persecuted people in pre-war Nazi Germany. In February 1939, in the Berlin head office alone, there were more than 30 workers, and they were handling some 120 emigration applications daily. The bureau was privately operated by Grüber without any formal mandate or authorization from the official church. Its activity was tolerated by the Gestapo because itwas seen to advance the cause of the emigration of so-called racial Jews from the territory of the Reich – which at that time was still a declared goal of Nazi racial policy. While the Bureau’s raison d’être and the primary focus of its activity were “non-Aryan Christians,” the distinctions became increasingly blurred as the Nazi persecution intensified. This was especially true after the formal establishment of the Nazi-controlled Reichsvereinigung, which, in accordance with Nazi racial doctrine, also included Christians of Jewish descent. From its inception, the leaders of the Reichsvereinigung – personalities such as Rabbi Leo Baeck, Otto Hirsch, and Eppstein - worked hand in hand with Grüber for the common goal of assisting the oppressed. In seeking to obtain alleviation or cancellation of the ever-radicalizing anti-Jewish measures, he would use his relatively protected position as an Aryan and his connections with government agencies and departments in order to intervene on behalf of the persecuted Jewish community. Thus, for instance, when, on the eve of the Jewish holiday of Passover in 1940, a ban was imposed on the import of wheat from Hungary for the purpose of baking matzot, Grüber was able to work out a special deal with the Food Ministry and ensure the supply of matzot. Even more risky was the action he undertook during the deportation of the Stettin Jews, the first Jewish community to be deported after the beginning of the war. On the night of February 12-13, 1940, almost the entire Jewish population of the Pommeranian city, including the aged, sick, and babies, were dragged out of their beds in freezing winter temperatures and brought to the railway station. From there they were shipped in cattle trucks on a four-day grueling journey to Lublin in Poland. Grüber, who had been notified of the outrage by the local army commander, protested to every senior ranking official he could reach. As a result, he was summoned to the Gestapo and warned not tointerfere again in these matters. Some six months later, the Jews of Baden and the Palatinate were being deported to unoccupied southern France, ostensibly as inhabitants of Alsace-Lorraine. Grüber, who had been informed of the action, proceeded immediately to alert the French representative on the Franco-German Armistice Commission in a vain effort to thwart the planned deportation. When he received alarming reports on the desperate plight of the deportees at the Gurs camp in southern France, Grüber decided to examine the situation at first hand. He was preparing for the trip, when, on December 19, 1940, the Gestapo suddenly came to arrest him. For the next two and a half years – overlapping with the wave of deportations from Germany – the rebellious clergyman was successively incarcerated in the Nazi concentration camps of Sachsenhausen and Dachau. Subjected to severe physical and mental torture, he was finally released on June 23, 1943, broken in body – though not in spirit. The Bureau itself had been dissolved in the wake of Grüber’s arrest, and most of its staff, consisting largely of “non-Aryan Christians,” was deported to the death camps in the East along with the rest of the Jewish population. From the end of the war to his death in Berlin in 1976, Grüber officiated as dean of the divided city of Berlin. An authentic and conscientious representative of the “other Germany,” he became a leading proponent of the rapprochement between the German Federal Republic and the State of Israel. Traveling to Israel in 1962, to testify for the prosecution at the Eichmann trial, he remained a lifelong supporter of the Jewish state. On July 28, 1964, Yad Vashem recognize Heinrich Grüber as Righteous Among the Nations.