Heribert (Eduard) Kluger OT

Eduard Kluger enters the German Order after his philosophical-theological training in Olomouc [Olomouc] in 1903 and receives the order name Heribert. On 1905 he lays off the eternal vows and is consecrated to the priest in the same year. Since 1911, he has been teaching as a religious professor at the Realgymnasium in Freudenthal and in 1931 he is managing the German Order Hospital. Since 1936 he also belongs to the General Council of the Order. Nordgau Prague Heribert Kluger appoints an honorary member in 1933.

After the signing of the so-called Munich Agreement of 30.9.1938, with which the southern German territories of the CSR are connected to the German Reich, the German Wehrmacht marches into the Sudetenland. In order to maintain the order, an abstaining commissioner shall be appointed with special rights and powers. The Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia is also part of its influence. On 27.2.1939, the silence commissioner Albert Hoffmann (1907–1972) has the resolution of the German Order. P. Heribert Kluger is forcibly retired because of his public uncompromising rejection of National Socialism as a religious teacher, among others because he expressed his disgust about the Jewish program on 9/10 November 1938.

On 20.7.1944, the Gestapo arrests him on the basis of an advert by the Gymnasial director Alfred Meissner for state-feminded preaching and alleged interrogation of enemy senders and transfers him to the court prison in Troppau [Opava]. He has to work here as a forced labourer in road construction.

On 6.1.1945 he will be KZ Dachau and dies on 18.1.1945 after painful mistreatment. An eyewitness of that time remembers: “He had been beaten so hard that his blood smudged the ground. When he was forced to lick his blood, he refused. Then he had been killed by his peers. ‘