Hermann Lange

Hermann Lange was a German Roman Catholic priest and one of the four Lübeck martyrs executed by the National Socialist regime in 1943. He was born on 16 April 1912 in Leer, in East Frisia in northwestern Germany, a region with a mixed but predominantly Protestant population. Lange grew up in a Catholic family and pursued priestly studies, completing his theological formation in the years leading up to the Second World War. He was ordained a priest for the Diocese of Osnabrück in 1938 and was soon assigned to pastoral work in Lübeck, where he served as a chaplain at the parish of the Sacred Heart (Herz-Jesu-Kirche). There he became known as a thoughtful and committed young priest who took seriously the formation of youth and the demands of Christian conscience under a totalitarian state.

In Lübeck, Lange formed part of a small ecumenical circle that included two other Catholic priests, Johannes Prassek and Eduard Müller, and the Lutheran pastor Karl Friedrich Stellbrink. The four men shared information drawn from forbidden foreign radio broadcasts, including the BBC, and they discussed and in some cases circulated sermons and texts that criticized Nazi policies such as the so-called euthanasia program and the conduct of the war. Lange’s intellectual temperament and his pastoral concern for young people led him to encourage critical reflection on the regime’s claims. Their conversations and activities were reported to the authorities. In June 1942 the Gestapo arrested Lange together with his three colleagues.

After months of imprisonment they were brought to trial. In 1943 the People’s Court condemned them to death on charges that included listening to enemy broadcasts and undermining the German war effort. On 10 November 1943 Hermann Lange was executed by guillotine in the prison at Holstenglacis in Hamburg, together with Prassek, Müller, and Stellbrink. He was thirty-one years old. The joint execution of Catholic priests and a Protestant pastor made the Lübeck martyrs a distinctive witness to Christian resistance across confessional lines during the Third Reich.

The Catholic Church later recognized Lange’s death as martyrdom. Together with Johannes Prassek and Eduard Müller he was beatified on 25 June 2011 in a ceremony held in Lübeck. Cardinal Angelo Amato, representing Pope Benedict XVI, presided at the beatification. The liturgical memorial of the Lübeck martyrs is kept on 10 November, the date of their execution. Blessed Hermann Lange is remembered as a priest who refused to separate pastoral care from the duty to speak the truth in the face of a criminal regime, and as one of a small group of clergy who paid for that fidelity with their lives.