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Biography

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Johannes Prassek was born on 13 August 1911 in the village of Barmke, near Helmstedt in northern Germany. Raised in the Catholic Church, he pursued studies for the priesthood and was ordained in 1937 for the Diocese of Osnabrück, which then included the city of Lübeck. In 1939 he was appointed chaplain at the Herz-Jesu-Kirche (Church of the Sacred Heart) in Lübeck. He soon gained a reputation as an energetic and accessible young priest, especially in work with young people.

Under the National Socialist regime his pastoral work took on a more dangerous character. Prassek learned Polish in order to minister to Polish forced laborers in Lübeck, hearing confessions and offering the sacraments in their language. He formed a close association with two other Catholic priests in the city, Hermann Lange and Eduard Müller, and with the Lutheran pastor Karl Friedrich Stellbrink. The four clergymen shared information, listened to foreign radio broadcasts that the regime had forbidden, and spoke critically of Nazi ideology, of the persecution of the churches, and of the war. Such speech was treated by the authorities as Wehrkraftzersetzung, the undermining of the German war effort.

The Gestapo arrested Stellbrink in April 1942 and took Prassek, Lange, and Müller into custody in the weeks that followed. After prolonged imprisonment the four men were tried in June 1943 by a senate of the People's Court sitting in Lübeck and were sentenced to death. On 10 November 1943 Johannes Prassek was executed by guillotine at the Holstenglacis prison in Hamburg, together with his three companions. He was thirty-two years old. The group became known as the Lübeck martyrs.

After the Second World War the remains of Prassek and of the two other Catholic priests were transferred to Lübeck and buried at the Herz-Jesu-Kirche, the parish in which he had served. Local memory of the four men developed into an ecumenical commemoration. On 25 June 2011 Johannes Prassek, Hermann Lange, and Eduard Müller were beatified as martyrs in a liturgy celebrated in Lübeck with the authorization of Pope Benedict XVI. Stellbrink is remembered with them as a fellow Christian witness, though as a Protestant pastor he was not a subject of the Catholic beatification. Their liturgical memorial is kept on 10 November, the day of their execution. They are honored as examples of pastoral fidelity and of Catholic-Lutheran solidarity under a totalitarian state.

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