Hermann Ludwig Maas

A self-described political liberal, Maas welcomed the democratic Weimar Republic, and for four years held a minor political office in Heidelberg, representing the liberal Deutsch-demokratische Partei. Among the pioneers of the European Protestant ecumenical movement, in 1914 he participated in the founding convention of the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches, an organization that during the interwar years cooperated with other established European churches, Quakers, and American denominations to promote disarmament, international cooperation, and world peace.

Most unusual of Maas's ecumenical and liberal commitments was his Zionism, which had crystallized in 1903 when he participated as an observer of the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel. At the invitation of the Women's International Zionist Organization, he visited Palestine in the spring of 1933. That August he financed his daughter's efforts to establish a weaving school in Jerusalem, where she trained Jewish refugees. On Maas's return to Heidelberg in June 1933, the Nazi party denounced him as “the Jew Pastor,” and demanded that the church suspend him from his Heidelberg pulpit. Bridling at the state's interference in church affairs, Bishop Julius Kühlewein of Baden successfully deflected the party's demands.

As the Nazi antisemitic measures intensified, Maas began helping Jews escape persecution. He befriended members of the Heidelberg Jewish community, from university professors to cobbler's apprentices. He helped obtain the release of some prisoners from the Gurs concentration camp and provided them with emigration papers and money. He found foster homes for young people in England. He arranged for emigrations to Palestine. He found jobs for adults, and produced legal visas, work permits, and transportation.

His influence spread beyond Heidelberg. After Rabbi Pinkuss emigrated to Brazil in 1936, Maas led synagogue prayer services in Heidelberg, cared for the Jewish elderly, and officiated at Jewish weddings and funerals. Pinkuss described Maas as the de facto rabbi of Heidelberg.

Maas was a member of the Pfarrernotbund, the emergency association for dissident Protestant pastors set up by Martin Niemöller in September 1933, and joined the “Confessing Church,” the opposition to the pro-Nazi “German Christians” within the Protestant Church. He was also a co-founder of the “Büro Grüber” in Berlin. In October 1940, while the Jews of Baden, the Palatinate and several places in Baden-Württemberg, were being deported to a concentration camp in sothern France, Maas succeeded in protecting some of the older and the frail from being included in the deportation. He kept in contact with those who were deported, using his connections to help them obtain exit visas abroad. 

Through his ecumenical connections in London and Geneva, Maas was able to work with a number of rescue organizations. As a Confessing Church pastor, he worked with his Berlin colleague Dr. Heinrich Grüber and others in the “Büro Grüber”, which helped hundreds of “non-Aryan” Protestants emigrate, in part by cooperating in the Kindertransporte to get endangered children out of the Third Reich.

Because helping Jews was a crime, Maas was under constant Gestapo scrutiny, but members of his Holy Spirit Church—some of whom worked within the Gestapo bureaucracy itself—stood behind him, he said, “like a strong wall.” In addition, his prominence as a leader in the international ecumenical movement made the Gestapo cautious about mistreating him. He was able to continue his work for ten years.

However, when in 1943 the police found irrefutable evidence against him, the Protestant church of Baden suspended Maas from all pastoral activity. A year later authorities sentenced the 67-year old retired pastor to hard labor in France under Organisation Todt. After the liberation of France, Maas was able to flee the camp and was back home in Heidelberg when the US 63rd Infantry liberated Heidelberg on March 30, 1945.