Blessed Nikolaus Gross

Blessed Nikolaus Gross (Nikolaus Groß) was a German miner, Christian trade unionist and journalist, a husband and the father of seven children. For his opposition to National Socialism he was sentenced to death and hanged in Berlin. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on January 15, the anniversary of the sentence.

He was born on September 30, 1898, in Niederwenigern on the Ruhr, near Essen, the son of a colliery blacksmith. After elementary school he worked in a sheet-metal rolling mill and then in a coal mine, where he spent five years underground. In 1917 he joined the Christian miners’ union, and a year later the Catholic Center Party.

At the age of 22 he became the union’s youth secretary. His union work took him to Waldenburg, today Wałbrzych in Poland, and to Zwickau in Saxony. In 1923 he married Elisabeth Koch of Niederwenigern. They had seven children; he wrote that his constant concern was for them to grow up capable, upright and strong in faith.

In 1927 he became editor in chief of the “Westdeutsche Arbeiterzeitung,” the newspaper of the Catholic Workers’ Movement (KAB), and in time moved with his family to Cologne. As early as 1930 he wrote that Catholic workers reject National Socialism not only for political and economic reasons but also because of their religious stance. After Hitler came to power the paper was called hostile to the state, and Gross learned to write between the lines. In November 1938 it was finally banned.

During the war years he belonged to the Cologne Circle, a group of Catholic activists seeking for Germany a path other than dictatorship, and he kept in contact with those preparing to overthrow Hitler. He himself took no part in preparing the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944. When, on the eve of the attempt, a priest he knew reminded him that he had seven children, he replied: “If we do not risk our life today, how then do we want to justify ourselves one day before God and our people?”

On August 12, 1944, the Gestapo arrested him at his home in Cologne. He was held in the Ravensbrück camp, then in Tegel prison in Berlin; his wife saw the marks of torture on his hands and arms. On January 15, 1945, the People’s Court, presided over by Roland Freisler, sentenced him to death. On January 21 he wrote a farewell letter to his wife and children. He assured them that through prayer it had become quiet and peaceful within him, and asked: “So do not weep, and do not grieve; pray for me and thank God, who has called me in love and brought me home.” On January 23, 1945, he was hanged in Plötzensee prison. He was denied a burial: his body was cremated and the ashes scattered.

John Paul II declared him blessed as a martyr on October 7, 2001, in Rome. He said of him that he loved his wife and children very much, yet not even that bond allowed him to draw back from confessing Christ and his Church.