Joseph Müller

Joseph Müller was a German Roman Catholic priest of the Diocese of Fulda who was put to death by the National Socialist government in 1944. He was born in 1894 in Salmünster in Hesse, then part of the German Empire. After theological studies he was ordained to the priesthood in the 1920s and served as a diocesan priest, not as a member of a religious order. His pastoral work took place in parishes in the region of Hesse during the Weimar Republic and the subsequent Nazi dictatorship.

Like many German clergy, Müller lived through the Kirchenkampf, the struggle between the Catholic Church and the Nazi state that followed the 1933 Concordat. He did not accommodate himself to National Socialist ideology and was noted for making jokes and remarks that ridiculed Adolf Hitler and the regime. Such speech was criminalized, especially in wartime, as Wehrkraftzersetzung. In 1944 he was denounced to the authorities and arrested by the Gestapo.

Müller was tried before the Volksgerichtshof, the People's Court in Berlin, a political tribunal notorious for its harsh sentences and for the conduct of its president Roland Freisler. He was condemned to death. On 11 September 1944 he was executed by guillotine at the Brandenburg-Görden Prison in Brandenburg an der Havel. He was fifty years of age at the time of his death.

Joseph Müller is remembered among the Catholic priests who were victims of the Nazi regime. Hundreds of priests were interned in concentration camps, particularly Dachau, and a smaller number were executed after trials or without trial. Müller himself has not been beatified or canonized by the Catholic Church, and he has no official feast day or declared patronages. His biography belongs to the history of Christian resistance and martyrdom in twentieth-century Germany, even though he remains a relatively little-known figure outside specialist literature on the period.