At Berlin in Germany, Blessed Nikolaus Gross, father of a family and martyr, who, wholly devoted to the cause of social justice, resisted in every way the wicked regime hostile to human dignity and to religion, so that he might do nothing against the commandments of God. For this reason he was cast into prison, and through the torment of hanging was made a sharer in the victory of Christ.
Lifespan: 1898–1945
Beatified: 7 October 2001 by Pope John Paul II
Memoria liturgica: 15 January
“As Catholic workers we reject National Socialism not only for political and economic reasons, but particularly also because of our religious and cultural convictions, clearly and decisively.”
Nikolaus Gross, a man like us in background and social standing, was born on 30 September 1898, the son of a mine blacksmith in Niederwenigern — near the city of Essen. From 1905 to 1912 he attended the local Catholic primary school. He first worked in a rolling mill and then as a labourer, before taking up work as a miner in a coal mine where for five years he laboured underground.
In his limited free time he sought to improve his education. In 1917 he joined the Gewerkverein christlicher Bergarbeiter (Christian Miners’ Trade Union); in 1918 the Zentrumspartei (Centre Party); and in 1919 he became a member of the Antonius Knappenverein (KAB) of Niederwenigern. Already at the age of twenty-two he became secretary of the youth section of the Christliche Bergarbeitergewerkschaft (Christian Miners’ Union), and just one year later assistant editor of the journal Bergknappe.
His further trade-union activity took him to Waldenburg in Silesia and, with an intermediate stay in Zwickau, back once more to Bottrop in the Ruhr.
In the meantime he had married Elisabeth Koch of Niederwenigern, who in the course of a happy marriage gave him seven children. He loved his family above all else and was an exemplary father, marked by a profound sense of responsibility in his children’s upbringing and education in the faith. The seriousness with which he approached this task can be gathered from his own pen. In his short publication Sieben um einen Tisch (Seven at a Table) he wrote: “My deepest and abiding concern is for the seven who must become capable, sincere, and strong in the faith.” Yet for all his love for his family, he did not seek refuge in domestic idyll. He remained attentive to social problems, precisely out of his sense of responsibility towards his family. Work and social commitment were for him the arena in which he lived out his Christian vocation. In his 1943 devotional publication he wrote: “Most great achievements arise from the daily fulfilment of duty in the small things of everyday life. And in doing this, our love goes always in a special way to the poor and the sick.”
At the beginning of 1927 he became assistant editor at the Westdeutsche Arbeiterzeitung, the organ of the KAB, of which he was soon promoted to editor-in-chief. Here he was able to offer guidance to Catholic workers on many questions concerning society and the world of labour; it became increasingly clear that for him political challenges contained a moral dimension, and that social tasks could not be resolved without spiritual effort. The editor became an apostle of the faith, bearing witness through the press. When in this capacity he moved to the Ketteler Haus in Cologne — in 1929 — he already had a clear judgement on the nascent National Socialism. Drawing on Bishop Ketteler’s principle that reform of the social order could be achieved only through a reform of the interior disposition, he discerned “political immaturity” and “a lack of discernment” in the National Socialists’ advances within society. Already then he described the Nazis as “mortal enemies of the present state.” As editor of the KAB’s organ he wrote on 14 September 1930: “As Catholic workers we reject National Socialism not only for political and economic reasons, but particularly also because of our religious and cultural convictions, clearly and decisively.”
Just a few months after Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, Robert Ley, leader of the Deutsche Arbeiterfront (German Labour Front), declared the KAB’s Westdeutsche Arbeiterzeitung an “enemy of the state.” In the period that followed, Gross sought to save the newspaper from suppression without having to make any compromise on its content. From that point on he managed to write between the lines in a way that those in the know could understand. In November 1938 the workers’ newspaper, by then renamed the Kettelerwacht, was definitively banned. Gross, who had had to struggle greatly for his professional credentials, was not a great orator, but he spoke in a persuasive, warm, and convincing manner. The fact that Nikolaus Gross joined the opposition in Germany arose from his Catholic faith. For him the principle held that “one must obey God rather than man. If we are asked to do something contrary to God or to the faith, it is not only our moral duty but our absolute duty to refuse to obey (men).” So wrote Nikolaus Gross in 1943 on the subject of religious doctrine. He became ever more clearly aware that this situation in Germany would indeed come to pass under Hitler’s regime.
Their shared deliberations were set down by Gross in two written notes that subsequently fell into the hands of the Gestapo: Die großen Aufgaben (The Great Tasks) and Ist Deutschland verloren? (Is Germany Lost?), both of which contributed to his condemnation.
From 1940 onward Gross was subjected to interrogations and searches. After the association’s newspaper was banned, he published a series of short writings intended to strengthen workers in their awareness of the faith and of ethical values.
The answer to what moved men like Nikolaus Gross is found in the memoirs of the well-known spiritual director of so many such men, Prelate Caspar Schulte of Paderborn, who recounts: “In my many conversations, above all with Nikolaus Gross and the ecclesiastical president of the association, Otto Müller, I came to know and to admire the moral greatness of these men. They did not go to their deaths by chance. They followed their path even in readiness to face a painful death for the sake of freedom. The day before the attempt I said to Nikolaus Gross: ‘Herr Gross, do not forget that you have seven children. I bear no responsibility for a family. This concerns your life.’ And Gross gave me an answer worthy of his true spiritual greatness: ‘If today we do not commit ourselves with our lives, how are we to pass our trial before God and our people?’”
In 1943 Gross wrote in a short publication what amounted almost to a prophecy:
“Sometimes it seems that my heart grows heavy and the task becomes insuperable when I measure human imperfection and inadequacy against the greatness of the commitment and the weight of responsibility. If a generation must pay for its brief life at the highest price — death — we search in vain for the answer within ourselves. We find it only in him who with his hand protects us in life and in death. We never know what trials await us, what strength and vigour of soul will be demanded of us… The paths of men wind through darkness. But even the darkness is not without light; hope and faith, which always go before us, already herald the dawn through the darkness. If we know that the best thing in us, the soul, is immortal, then we also know that we shall meet again.”
What a witness to a sense of duty, to awareness of reality, and to trust in the faith! Luminous signs for our journey in a time when all three seem to have been lost. For Gross, trust in God was the foundation that kept him from wavering.
After the failed assassination attempt of 20 July 1944, events moved swiftly. Gross, who had not taken direct part in its preparation or execution, was arrested on 12 August 1944 around midday at his home and taken first to the prison at Ravensbrück and then to Tegel prison in Berlin. His wife Elisabeth visited him twice in Berlin. She reported clear signs of torture on his hands and arms. The prison letters of Nikolaus Gross bear convincing witness that for him continual prayer was the source of strength in his difficult and, in the end, desperate situation. There is scarcely a letter in which he does not take the opportunity to ask his wife and children to pray constantly, as he himself prayed day after day for his family. In prayer he knew himself bound to his family, yet at the same time in unceasing communion with God.
In his letters Nikolaus Gross showed continually that he believed his fate and that of his family to be in God’s hands.
On 15 January 1945 the death sentence was pronounced by the President of the People’s Court, Roland Freisler. The concluding observation in the records, and in reality the sole grounds for the sentence: “He swam with the others in the current of treason and therefore must drown in it!” The Nazis made no martyrs. They granted the hanged man no grave: for the promoters of lies and hatred there was only brutal elimination.
Yet the witness of truth and faith cannot be extinguished; it lives on in those who have gone before us, illuminating our path. The prison chaplain Buchholz, who from a hiding place gave the condemned man his blessing for his last brief journey, later reported: “Gross bowed his head in silence. His face already seemed illumined by the radiance into which he was about to be received.”
Christian burial was denied him by the ruling party; his body was cremated and the ashes scattered over frozen fields.