On August 9, 1943, Franz Jaegerstaetter was beheaded for refusing to serve in the German army. The March 2009 edition of New Oxford Review contains my article “Pope Benedict’s Surprise” — the surprise being that Franz had been declared a martyr (on June 1, 2007) when the Nazis were not rounding up Catholics for wholesale execution. My answer was that Franz was a martyr because he had defended two Catholic teachings with his life: free will and just war.

This post is, however, biographical. Why now? Because I thought of Franz when three U.S. cardinals (Cupich, McElroy, and Tobin) stated on 60 Minutes (April 12) that the military action by the United States against Iran which started on February 28 was unjust, and Pope Leo XIV has implicitly agreed. They may be right or they may be wrong, but their conclusion is not based on a rigorous analysis. For example, the threshold question is whether the war at issue started in 1979 or what could be characterized as the latest battle in that war on February 28. For a rigorous analysis using Catholic just war teaching, see my posts of August 27 and September 3, 2024, assessing whether Israel’s response to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, was just.

Franciscus (Franz) was born out of wedlock in 1907. His parents were young and poor. He was raised in poverty and in Catholicism by his maternal grandmother, a shoemaker’s widow with 13 children. His parents never married before his father died in World War I in 1915. In 1917, his mother married Heinrich Jaegerstaetter, and mother and son moved to his farm in St. Radegund, Austria, a village of about 550 people. Mr. Jaegerstaetter adopted Franz.

Franz’s formal schooling took place in a one-room, one-teacher schoolhouse with 50 to 60 students and ended at age 14. All but one villager was Catholic.

As a teenager, Franz went with a rough crowd. At age 20 he left the area and worked at a farm and in iron mines. He went on pilgrimage more than once to the religious shrine in Altoetting. By the time he returned to his village three years later, he had become a devout Catholic. Nonetheless, he got a girl from another village pregnant and she gave birth to their daughter Hildegard in 1933. Franz’s mother strenuously objected to him marrying the woman, but he provided child support and visited Hildegard frequently. In that same year, 1933, Franz’s adoptive father died at age 49. In 1936 Franz married a devout Catholic, Franziska (Fanny) Schwaninger. Franzl — as she called him — was 29 and she 23. While they were still engaged, they went to Hildegard’s mother and offered to adopt the girl, but the offer was rejected. Franz and his bride went on an expensive honeymoon (the equivalent of seven months’ of her wages) to Rome.

Two years later, on March 12, 1938, Hitler’s troops invaded Austria. The next day, in Linz, Hitler proclaimed the annexation (Anschluss) of Austria. A plebiscite on that issue planned for March 13 was postponed to April 10. Before the vote, Franz and his godson, Franz Huber, went to Bavaria and conversed with Germans about their experiences under the Nazis.

Franz knew the Nazis. He once wrote that they had not fallen from the sky and that the Austrians had known for years what was planned. The pastoral letter of his local bishop, Bishop Gfoellner of Linz, condemning the Nazis, had been read in all the churches of the diocese on January 22, 1933. Franz adopted as his own the bishop’s phrase, “One cannot be a true Nazi and a good Catholic.”

Franz had read in his diocesan newspaper the Dutch bishops’ statement of 1936. (See “Ban on the Nazi Party in Holland Is Ordered by Catholic Bishops; Pastoral Letter to Be Read Today Warns Sacraments Will Be Denied to Those Who Join — Party Claims 55,000 Members There, of Whom One-Quarter Are Said to Be Catholics,” New York Times, May 24, 1936.) And in April 1937, every church in the diocese had read Pope Pius XI’s anti-Nazi encyclical, “With Burning Concern,” in a condensed form prepared by his bishop. So, when the local peasants’ organization had weakened in its opposition to the Nazis, Franz resigned.

By April 10, the villagers of St. Radegund knew the Germans had arrested tens of thousands of Austrians. Among the villagers, only Franz voted no, but the local authorities, fearing for the safety of the one who stood out, declined to record it. Franz refused to cooperate with the Nazi regime in a number of other ways. When the Nazis were looking to appoint a mayor and inquiries were made of Franz, he declined. Franz rejected family assistance grants even after Nazis had personally lobbied him. He rejected disaster relief monies provided after storms destroyed his and other villagers’ crops. He had a reputation for never making donations to the “red tins” for various Nazi causes. He would get into arguments about the regime with villagers in the local pubs, so he stopped going to the pubs.

When he was called up for military duty in June 1940, however, he reported. He made no effort to seek a deferment from anyone in civilian government service so he would not be beholden to them. The mayor (a local farmer who had agreed to become mayor so no outsider would) happened to learn, however, that Franziska had become ill just a few weeks after giving birth to their third child, and that Franz’s mother was in the hospital. On his own initiative, the mayor went to military authorities to seek Franz’s release. Thus, Franz was in the military just a few days. (It is jarring to see pictures of him in uniform.)

In July, the pastor of Franz’s parish, Father Karobath, was removed by Nazi authorities because of an anti-Nazi sermon.

Franz was called up a second time in October. Again he made no request for a deferment. While in the service, he became fast friends with another soldier, Rudolf Mayer, and together in December they joined the Third Order of St. Francis, an organization whose members seek to grow spiritually with St. Francis of Assisi as a model. On February 27, 1941, Franz wrote Franziska that the mental asylum in Ybbs had been full of patients but they had all become suddenly sane because it was now nearly empty. The next month, Franz asked Franziska to approach the mayor to get him released. The mayor did so on the basis that he was indispensable to his farm. Franz was released in April 1941. Franz told his wife, mother, and Mayer that he would never return to service.

Nonetheless, the summons to return to service could be expected to come at any time. He wrote, “Consider what great efforts and sacrifices so many of us men are prepared to make to gain worldly esteem, or athletes to win a prize.” So, like an athlete, he employed a spiritual training regimen seeking wisdom and strength, redoubling whatever he had done before.

He regularly brought food to the poor. He attended Mass daily, fasting through the morning. The new pastor, Father Fuerthauer, invited him to become the sacristan to replace the man who had passed away. The young couple read the Bible every day. As he plowed, Franz would sing hymns and pray the Rosary. He sent to Mayer, who was at the front, copies of the pastoral letter issued by the bishops of Germany and read in all the churches July 6, 1941. It was a formal protest against Nazi persecution of the Church, restriction of religious education, and seizure of church property. It asserted that innocent people cannot be killed, directly opposing the regime’s “T4” euthanasia program. In the summer of 1942, Mayer sent a book on St. Thomas More to Franz.

During this time, the mayor sought to protect Franz a third time. He came into possession of a letter from a villager to the Gestapo naming ten villagers, including Franz, as anti-Nazi. The mayor destroyed the letter.

On February 23, 1943, Franz signed a receipt for the letter recalling him to military service, saying to his wife, “I have just signed my death sentence.” Franz’s mother sought to save her son and asked relatives and neighbors to persuade her son not to refuse. When Franziska saw these people ganging up on her Franzl, she did not want him to stand alone, so she made sure that they heard her support him. (After Franz’s execution, they used this as proof that she had failed as a wife and mother because she had not persuaded Franz to desist.)

This was not the first day, nor would it be the last, that Franz heard the arguments of relatives, neighbors, and clergy that he could not sit in judgment on a war, that he had to do his moral duty to save the Fatherland, that he had moral duties to his wife and children, that his religious leaders were not declaring the war unjust even if the regime was evil, that priests and seminarians were agreeing to being inducted, that Nazis were no longer being denied Communion, that it was a morally good thing to crush Soviet Communism, that his refusal would have no impact on the outcome of the war, that he was a religious fanatic, that he was actively seeking martyrdom, that he would be committing a form of suicide, that he would be foolishly wasting his life, that he may never be ordered to the Front or to kill, that Hitler rather than any of his soldiers should be blamed for prosecuting the war, that as a soldier he could help injured soldiers and protect civilians. He pondered each of these arguments and responded to each of them in conversation and in essays and letters for his family.

Those who sought to dissuade him point out that he would not change his mind. They fail to point out that he was unable to persuade them. He had had a dream in 1938 of a train going to hell and he wanted to alert others not to board it. Whatever his responses to their arguments, what in the end did he think of the people who made these arguments? He gently said, “They had not been given the grace.”

As for him, he could not live a lie. He could not kill or aid the killing in an unjust war as though it was not grievously wrong. If he did so, he could not live with himself, he could not face his children. “I cannot bring myself to act in any other way,” he wrote. His writings declare: “What Catholic dares to declare that the predatory raids which Germany has already made, and is still carrying on in several countries, are a just and holy war?” “For what purpose has God given all people understanding and free will if, as some say, we have no right at all to decide whether this war being waged by Germany is just or unjust? Then what use is our ability to distinguish between what is good or evil?”

Jaegerstaetter rejected trying to hide in the woods for fear it would cause reprisals against his family. In my research I have not seen any consideration he may have given to joining the Resistance or to fleeing with his family in the manner of Austrian Navy Captain George Ritter von Trapp of the 1965 film The Sound of Music.

To spare the mayor, the village, and his family from seeing him arrested in the village, he decided not to refuse to report. Instead, he and Franziska walked in the pre-dawn darkness the three miles to Tittmoning. The scene evokes the words of Robert Frost’s poem: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep/ and miles to go before I sleep.”

From Tittmoning, he went by himself by rail to Enns. There, on March 1, 1943, he declared his refusal to serve. He was arrested and was imprisoned in nearby Linz, in an overcrowded cell, chained to a wall. In early May, he was transferred to a prison outside Berlin: Tegel. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer had been sent there a month earlier.) Franz had prepared mentally and spiritually for a summary execution; he had not expected a long imprisonment. After four months of imprisonment, he was tried by court martial and convicted on July 6, the same day Sir Thomas More — the chancellor of Henry VIII — was beheaded in 1535.

Jaegerstaetter did not know on what day the sentence would be carried out. To prevent suicide, all prisoners sentenced to death were handcuffed around the clock. Jaegerstaetter’s appointed lawyer asked his pastor and wife to come to the prison to save his life. They left for Berlin immediately. The three met for 20 minutes, with the pastor doing most of the talking to persuade him to end his refusal to serve. His wife was given little time to talk and did not try to persuade him.

Jaegerstaetter was guillotined at the Brandenburg prison on August 9. He was 36.

During the month he was on death row, Jaegerstaetter had been strengthened when the prison chaplain told him of Father Heinrich Reinisch who had been executed a year earlier for his refusal to serve, and he received a letter from Mayer stating that Jaegerstaetter had chosen “the better way,” referring to the Gospel story of Martha and Mary and the latter’s choice to attend the Lord (Luke 10:42). Three days after Jaegerstaetter’s execution, Mayer was declared missing in action.

Franz’s cremated remains were recovered in 1946 and interred in his parish cemetery. Franziska had taken over as sacristan when Franz left, and she continued to serve as sacristan for many years. Widowed at age 30, she never remarried. Because Jaegerstaetter was not deemed part of the Resistance, she did not receive a pension.

The world found out about Franz Jaegerstaetter when Gordon Zahn, an American sociologist, visited Germany to discover what had happened to the German peace movement during the war. The visit resulted in his book, In Solitary Witness (1964).

On October 26, 2007, in the cathedral in Linz, the town where Hitler declared the annexation of Austria, the childhood home of Adolf Eichmann, the town where Jaegerstaetter was first imprisoned and chained, Jaegerstaetter was declared “blessed.” Franziska, aged 94 years and still lively then, and Franz’s four daughters, ages 67 to 74, attended the ceremonies. (Franziska died on March 16, 2013, two weeks after her 100^th birthday.)

Jaegerstaetter’s refusal to serve the Nazis, and his solitary witness in opposition to the inhumanity of destroying human life, has inspired many who are not of the Catholic faith. For example, Israeli playwright Yehoshua Sobol based his play Eyewitness on Jaegerstaetter’s story. The play premiered in 2002 at Tel Aviv’s Cameri Theater, and was performed in Austria, Switzerland, Germany, and London as I Witness. In 2019, Terrence Malick’s film biography A Hidden Life was released.