A pastor in the German resistance to Hitler. Captain Ulrich Sporleder. Part 1 of 2.

On 20 July 1944, an attempt at a coup d’etat was made in National Socialist Germany. The coup involved a group of army officers seizing power after the successful assassination of Adolf Hitler. The plotters came from all sorts of backgrounds. Some of them like Berlin police chief Wolf-Heinrich Julius Otto Bernhard Fritz Hermann Ferdinand Graf von Helldorff were Nazi old fighters with a long record of crime on their hands. Others were politicians who had once opposed the Nazis in the Reichstag and other places of government. Others were professional army officers who had initially accepted the Hitler regime but as time progressed had come to loathe it. And others were clergymen such as Ulrich Sporleder who had been opposed to National Socialism from the very beginning.

Ulrich Sporlede was born on 7 July 1911 in Schwerte. Schwerte is a town in the Ruhr area close to Unna. In 1911 it was an industrial town, the first nickel coins in Germany were produced here after a nickel smelting process had been discovered in the nineteenth century.
Ulrich Sporleder was born as the second of three children into a wealthy landowning family originally from Mecklenburg and Silesia. The family of Ulrich Sporleder included a number of mayors in towns such as Herne, Aschersleben , Havelberg and Berlin – Adlershof. The painter Clara Sporleder was his aunt, the sculptor Lenore Gerber-Sporleder his cousin, the writer, philologist and psychologist Gerd Schimansky his brother-in-law and the opera singer Kurt Manfred Sporleder (1915–1976) was his brother.
The young Ulrich thus spent his youth mainly in Frankfurt am Main and at Braunfels Castle Lahn in relative financial security despite the troubling 1920s. He also came into contact early on with Christian youth movements and with pastor Martin Niemöller , who became a close friend. He also counted amongst his friends a number of officers of the Reichswehr and later the German Wehrmacht.
After graduating from high school in Wetzlar, Sporleder studied theology at the University of Königsberg from the summer semester of 1930. In the winter semester of 1931/32 Sporleder continued his studies at the University of Marburg before returning in the summer semester of 1932 to the University of Königsberg.
In 1933, conservative elements in the German establishment persuaded President Paul von Hindenburg to elevate Adolf Hitler to the Chancellorship. Within a short time using violence and the threat of violence, Hitler was able to make himself dictator and eliminate other political parties. The attempts by the regime to embrace the Protestant church into its worldview encouraged people like Ulrich Sporleder to resist it.
This is Altenburg in Thuringia. In 1931, a group called German Christians had run for church representative elections here. On 6 June 1932, the Berlin pastor Joachim Hossenfelder founded the German Christians faith movement as an inner-evangelical church for the entire Reich. In its "guidelines" of the same day, it stated:
"We see race, ethnicity and nation as life orders given to us and entrusted to us by God. [...] Therefore, racial mixing must be opposed. [...] We see the Jews as a serious danger to our ethnicity. It is the gateway for foreign blood into our national body. [...] In particular, marriage between Germans and Jews must be prohibited." [5]
This program also included the dissolution of the 29 regional churches governed by synods and the creation of a " Reich Church " structured according to the Führer principle, the exclusion of Jewish Christians, the “de-Judaization” of the church’s message through turning away from the Old Testament, reducing and reinterpreting the New Testament, the “purification of the Germanic race” through “protection from incompetent” and “inferior” people and the destruction of Marxism ”.
This organisation came about entirely independently of the National Socialist party, although clearly they both had similar ideologies. Perhaps it too came about as a result of the collapse of the Second Reich in 1918 and the overturning of the conservative order that it had once represented. The poverty and despair of the market crash of the early 1930s might have added to its convictions. Once Hitler came to power, it was the German Christian church which was favoured by the state and seen as an arm of the party, and thus, the state. Those that disapproved came together in the Confessing Church, representing the traditional evangelical church of which Sporleder was a member.
Sporleder took the view that it was not the Confessing Church which had placed itself outside the state, but that the Nazi state itself was causing exclusion.

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