15 Sep Alfred Delp SJ

Alfred Delp SJ: 70 years after his arrest, trial and death in Nazi Germany

On this day, September 15, in 1944, Alfred Delp turned 37. He was a Jesuit priest who had been arrested six weeks earlier on suspicion of treason against Germany’s Third Reich.  He spent this day, as he had most of the previous weeks since his July 28 arrest, in the Moabit Prison in Berlin.

 
Delp’s anti-Hitler activities had been many: as the parish priest of St. Georg’s parish in Bogenhausen, a suburb of Munich, he had encouraged youth groups to gather without Nazi approval, he had defied Nazi orders by helping to keep crosses on the walls of classrooms of Catholic schools, he had spoken out against the euthanasia program of people in mental asylums.

Helmut von Moltke and the Kreisau Circle

In 1942 he joined two other Jesuit priests, Augustin Rösch and Lothar König, in a loosely-knit group later known as the Kreisau Circle, named after the estate of the leader of the group, the aristocrat and lawyer Helmut von Moltke. The aim of the group was to plan the constitution of a renewed Germany after its inevitable defeat.

The group’s existence was discovered after the July 20, 1944, attempted assassination of Hitler. All the members were arrested.  Alfred Delp was arrested outside his  church on July 28.  He was taken by train to Berlin, where, in the Moabit Prison on the Lehrterstrasse, he underwent beatings and long hours of harsh interrogation.