The High Price for Harboring Paratroopers in Church

September 27

On this day in 1942, the German authorities banned the Orthodox Church in the Czech Republic.

Holy New Martyr Gorazd (Pavlik) of Moravia and Silesia

Greetings on the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross!

My area of expertise is the Russian Church in the twentieth century specifically in the diaspora and also in the homeland. Therefore, it should come as no surprise I write here a lot about the time of World War Two, when the Russian churchmen had to make choices dependent on their circumstances under the Nazis or Soviet regimes.

I wrote on September 23 about the role of the ROCOR Archbishop Serafim (Lade) of Berlin (1883–1950) regarding the local Church in Poland (in 1939; following the partition of the country by the Nazis and the Soviets, the church in the east of the country came under the Moscow Patriarchate and in the west under the ROCOR). Earlier on August 6 I wrote about difficult choices that the leaders of the Church in the occupied Belarus had to make. In that account I mentioned Generalkommissar for Weissruthenien (Belarus) Wilhelm Kube who was successfully assassinated in 1943 by the Soviet partisans. Today I will be mentioning another Nazi official whose assassination came with a high price for Orthodox in Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren (Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia).