Viktor Glondys

Viktor Glondys (7 December 1882 – 28 October 1949) was a theologian and Lutheran bishop of the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession in Romania. Born in Austria-Hungary and of ethnic German origin, he became active in Czernowitz and then present-day Romania, notably within the region of Transylvania after its union with Romania in 1918.

Born in Bielsko in then Austria-Hungary to an ethnically German family, Glondys initially studied philosophy before having a crisis of faith in 1903 that motivated him to convert to Lutheranism and instead started studying evangelical theology. His first pastoral assignment was as a vicar in Eisenau. He then became a personal vicar in Czernowitz in 1909. In 1910, he was officially ordained and inaugurated there, before in 1912 becoming pastor following the previous one's retirement. As a pastor, he led the congregation there through multiple Russian occupations during World War I, before eventually being forced to flee to Upper Austria. He then advocated for a pro-Austria view during the war and was a refugee pastor and later endorsed the Union of Bukovina with Romania after the fall of the Russian Empire. In 1922, he was elected city parish priest of Brașov. During his tenure, he was known for his extensive lectures on theology sponsored by the Gustav Adolf Association. In 1930, during the Great Depression, Glondys was appointed a priest. Soon after, in 1931, he delivered one of his most famous speeches on the Good Samaritan, which rejected völkisch interpretations of it and advocated for the universal commandment of love. He was attacked by the self-help movement (a pro-Nazi movement) for this speech, which eventually led him to state it was a "misunderstanding".

In 1932 he became bishop of the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession. He quickly started addressing the matters of autonomy for the church and school institutions, and eventually, he permitted "cohabitation" to happen to prevent damage, letting Nazis start to be accepted in church leadership. In 1934, during a meeting of the ''volksrat'', a fallout happened between him and the Nazis, to which he revealed the existence of their plans to undermine the church. After a split in the self-help movement, Glondys started supporting the moderate factions of the Nazis in a concordat. By 1938, the Nazis gained a majority in the consistory, to which Glondys immediately shifted to aligning himself with völkisch rhetoric and joining the National Renaissance Front. In 1939, he made another controversial decision against the Nazis, stating that he alone made ecclesiastical decisions and that no party disciplined the church. This eventually led to the new ''Volksgruppenführer'' of Romania, Andreas Schmidt, pressuring him to withdraw from the church, which he did in 1941. After this, he went to work at the Lutheran Academy and started promoting anti-Nazi works and interpretations of the bible, but in 1944 the Romanian coup d'état happened and the Nazi consistory was overthrown. It was agreed upon that Glondys would return to the post of bishop. During this brief period as bishop, Glondys tried to push a viewpoint to the government that the ethnic Germans were forced to, under moral duress, to cooperate with the Nazis, including in memoranda. However, the Soviet Control Commission demanded that Glondys be removed from office for being sympathetic toward Hitler, and so he was again forced into retirement in February 1945. From then on, he kept a relatively minor profile before dying in 1949. Provided by Wikipedia