A Faith His Village Could Not Understand

On August 9, 1943, Franz Jägerstätter was executed by guillotine at Brandenburg-Görden Prison in Germany. His crime was simple: he refused to swear an oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler and serve in the Wehrmacht.

Jägerstätter was a farmer and church sexton from the tiny Austrian village of St. Radegund. When he reported to the military induction center in Enns in March 1943, he told the officers he could not serve a regime he believed was waging an unjust war. His parish priest urged him to comply. His bishop in Linz counseled obedience to the state. His neighbors called him a fool. Even his mother begged him to think of his wife Franziska and their three young daughters.

He thought of them constantly. From his prison cell, he wrote to Franziska that he could not in good conscience take an oath to a government waging an unjust war. He knew what his refusal would cost. He chose faithfulness anyway.

In Revelation 2:10, the risen Christ tells the church at Smyrna, "Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will give you life as the victor's crown." Jägerstätter took those words with the sober clarity of a man who had counted the cost and found that Christ was worth more than survival.

Most of us will never face a guillotine. But every believer faces moments where faithfulness is costly and silence would be easier. The question Jägerstätter's life puts to us is not whether we would die for our convictions, but whether we are living by them now.