Conrad Gröber

He first attended the gymnasium in Donaueschingen, then the Heinrich Suso-Gymnasium in Konstanz, and was an alumnus of the reopened Konradihaus (St. Conrad's Archdiocesan House of Studies).

After a short time of activity as a vicar in Ettenheim he was a curate for two years at the St. Stephanskirche in Karlsruhe, where he became familiar with the specific problems of a city pastorate.

There he met the students Max Josef Metzger, later a priest murdered by the Nazis, and Martin Heidegger, whom he actually started on the path of philosophy, and toward whom he had a lifelong but tense relationship.

At the Freiburg Katholikentag (Catholic assembly) of 1929, he met Eugenio Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII), on whose behalf he was decisively involved in the negotiations toward a concordat with the Reich.

He became a supporting member of the Schutzstaffel in 1933,[3] adopted the regime's anti-semitic rhetoric[4] and offered only mild, ineffectual objections to inhumane policies such as compulsory sterilization or the eugenicist murder of people with disabilities in Aktion T4.

[7] Thus Gröber wrote in an exhortation dated 8 November 1933 on the subject of the vote and plebiscite regarding Germany's withdrawal from the League of Nations, that it was a duty to the fatherland to show unanimity with one's fellow countrymen.

"[citation needed] The Baden Interior Minister Pflaumer honored the cooperation promised by Gröber and sent the following directive to police headquarters on 13 November 1933: "Forceful measures against Catholic clergymen outside the framework of the general laws are not permitted in the future."

Anton Rauscher has said that Catholic theology of the era reflected "a view of the Jews which provoked anti-Semitism on the one hand, while on the other undermining the ability to oppose it.

As for the "people" or, in his words, the "wavering crowd of Jews", the archbishop said, "The Pharisees' secret service had awakened the animal in it through lies and slander, and it was eager for grisly excitement and blood."

Unto this present day..."[9]On 15 July 1938, Britain's Catholic Herald reported that Groeber had released "An amazing document... giving a picture of the religious situation in Germany after five years of Nazi rule".

[10] After the beginning of the organized killing of the mentally and physically handicapped, termed euthanasia, he protested in a letter to the Baden Interior Minister Pflaumer, and was the first of the German bishops to do so in writing, according to Schwalbach.

[12] He stopped short of any tactic that could be effective, however, leaving it to Clemens August Graf von Galen, bishop of Münster, to publicly oppose these murders at great personal risk.

Luckner organized, with the support of Gröber, an "Office for Religious War Relief" (Kirchliche Kriegshilfsstelle) under the auspices of the Catholic aid agency, Caritas.

[18] On the other hand, he is still reproached to this day on the ground that he had not sufficiently supported the suffragan bishop Johannes Baptista Sproll who was driven out of his diocese of Rottenburg as early as 1938.

On 12 November, Gröber informed his diocesan clergy of the sentence against Metzger, with, among others, the following words: This thoroughly sad case should teach us insistently that we refrain painstakingly from everything and anything that could hurt our Fatherland in any way in its difficult hour, and could hurt ourselves as well; that we honor, gratefully and prayerfully, the enormous sacrifices and successes of our soldiers in the field; strengthen the courage of our faithful in the homeland [...], consider the frightful disaster of a lost war with Bolshevistic consequences, and daily ask God... to protect our homeland and bless it with an honorable internal and external peace.Yet the bitter confrontations from the Nazi era remained: Gröber tried to silence an event for the so-called "concentration camp priests", initiated by Pastor Wilhelm Köhler and Richard Schneider, who was the first diocesan clergyman taken to the Dachau concentration camp in 1940, although 5 of the 16 clergymen from Gröber's diocese imprisoned in the camp were murdered.

"[citation needed] On 26 September 2019, Konstanz City Hall revoked honorary citizenship that was bestowed to Gröber in 1932, due to contemporary historical research that has widely documented his antijudaism and his membership in the SS.

[19] On 29 June 2023, the city of Konstanz removed his name from the Conrad-Gröber-Straße and renamed it after the same controversy concerning Gröber's early support to the III Reich and nazi antisemitism.