Walther Kampe (1908 - 1998)

His solidarity with the Catholic population of Bessarabia.

In 1919, as part of the German youth movement, the Catholic clergy founded the 'Neudeutschland' association as one of the Catholic youth organizations, in which they organized Catholic students from secondary schools. The students who had outgrown the circle of pupils formed the 'Neudeutschen Älterenbund'. In addition to an energetic Catholicism (retreats and charity), these associations emphasized 'Deutschtumsarbeit (German work)', among other things. The spirit of this youth movement was particularly evident on the 'Fahrt (journey)'. It meant a journey under the simplest conditions, the search for the unadulterated and unaffected, which was believed to be discovered primarily among the rural population. The destinations were not only in Germany, but also abroad.

At the suggestion of the 'Auslandsamt von Neudeutschland Älterenbund', Walther Kampe, a student at the Philosophisch-Theologische Universität St. Georg in Frankfurt am Main and member of the 'Neudeutschen Älterenbund', led 16 Frankfurt university students on their first visit to Bessarabia in August 1932 as the leader of the 'Bessarabienkreis'. They spent six days each in Krasna and its daughter colonies Emmental, Balmas and Larga, briefly visited the Protestant communities of Paris and Tarutino and met for a joint two-day camp with the 'Siebenbürger Wandervogel' and the Bessarabian youth in Bad Burnas on the Black Sea. In his "Report on the activities of the Frankfurt Bessarabian Circle in Bessarabia in August 1932", Walther Kampe writes: "The aim of our first trip:

1. to get to know the communities in their economic, cultural and ecclesiastical situation.
2. to awaken and deepen the awareness of the large German national community within the Central European living space through personal encounters between our Reich German group and the foreign settlers [...]."

After his ordination as a priest on December 8, 1934 in Limburg / Lahn, Walther Kampe became involved in pastoral care abroad with the Bessarabian Germans and was a pastor in Emmental/Bessarabia from 1935 until the resettlement in 1940. After the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia in 1940, Walther Kampe left Emmental in June 1940 and moved to Hermannstadt/Sibiu, Romania, where he worked as a religious teacher and as a German pastor for Transylvania. After the armistice between Romania and the Soviet Union, he was arrested by the Soviets in August 1944 and held in a labor camp in the Ukraine from January 1945 to 1947. In April 1947, he returned to Germany on an ambulance and became chaplain in St. Leonhard, Frankfurt a. M. in November 1947.

After fleeing from Eastern Europe in 1945, many former Bessarabian Germans were stranded in Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein. The still young Federal Republic of Germany issued a decree in November 1949 to equalize the distribution of refugees and displaced persons. In this context, Walther Kampe, with the help of the then district administrator of Mayen/Rhineland-Palatinate, arranged for the relocation of the former Catholic Bessarabian ethnic group from Protestant-dominated northern Germany to Catholic communities in Rhineland-Palatinate in 1950. For the majority of these former Catholic Bessarabian Germans, the districts of Mayen, Koblenz and Neuwied became their new home.

After his consecration as bishop in 1952, Wather Kampe worked as an auxiliary bishop in Limburg / Lahn. Many "Emmentäler" showed their solidarity with their former pastor by visiting His Excellency Walther Kampe in Limburg.

Gisela Schaal

Stuttgart, January 11, 2021

Report by Walter Kampe on the activities of the Frankfurt Bessarabian Circle in Bessarabia in August 1932