Lohmeyer Called Up for Active Military Service

Als offensichtliche Strafmaßnahme war die Einberufung des inzwischen fast 50-jährigen Lohmeyer vom 27. August 1939 gedacht.

The conscription of the nearly fifty-year-old Lohmeyer on August 27, 1939 was intended to be a manifestly punitive action.

Lohmeyer’s unit was sent to Poland on September 11, 1939. Lohmeyer served in the “rearward services” in Wehrmacht military administration between 1940 and 1943 and, with the rank of captain, as chief of a local commandant's headquarters in Crimea as of 1942.

The official documents from the Russian military prosecutor general’s office available since 1996, thoroughly substantiate Lohmeyer’s humane conduct toward not only the civilian population but also Soviet prisoners of war. Even in wartime, Lohmeyer’s exegetical and theological work remained his principle interest for which always he found time or took leave.

Physically ill and a mental wreck, Lohmeyer returned to Greifswald in April of 1943. In a memorial service honoring the deceased New Testament scholar Kurt Deissner in June of 1943, Lohmeyer especially stressed Deissner’s anti-völkisch conception of Jesus and gave his first lecture critically examining Rudolf Bultmann’s “theory of demythologization” in Breslau in January of 1944 – evidently at the request of circles of the Silesian Confessing Church.