Joannes Baptista Sproll (pronounced as /de/; 2 October 1870 - 4 March 1949) was a German bishop and prominent opponent of the Nazi regime.
Sproll was born in Schweinhausen, near Biberach, the son of a street mender, Josef Sproll, and his wife, Anna Maria née Freuer. He attended the Latin school in Biberach and the Gymnasium Ehingen. He studied Catholic theology at the University of Tübingen from 1890 to 1894. In 1898, he received his Ph.D. for his work on the history of the law and constitution of the Tübingen monastery of St. George. On 14 June 1927 he became the Bishop of Rottenburg.
During the Nazi era, Sproll often spoke out against the regime, and his abstention from the plebiscite over the Anschluss led to preliminary proceedings and staged demonstrations against him. At the end of August 1938, Sproll was expelled from his diocese and could not return again until 1945. On 1 August 1940 Conrad Gröber, Archbishop of Freiburg, and the Vicar General of the Diocese of Rottenburg (acting for Sproll) protested against the euthanasia programmes in Grafeneck; this was also the year of the protest of the Bishop of Münster, Clemens August Graf von Galen. Sproll died in 1949 in Rottenburg am Neckar.
Sproll initially welcomed the Reichskonkordat between Nazi Germany and the Holy See, but later publicly opposed the Nazis.[1] His demonstrative absence from the Reichstag election on April 10, 1938 (where only a Nazi-dominated unified list was allowed) – which was combined with a referendum on the Anschluss of Austria – led to an investigation and demonstrations orchestrated by the Nazi authorities against him.[2] On July 23, 1938, Sproll was expelled from his diocese, only returning in 1945. On the same day, SA men stormed the Rottenburg Bishop's Palace. During this time, he lived in Krumbad, a district of the town Krumbach (Bavarian Swabia), today Günzburg district in the Diocese of Augsburg, under Gestapo surveillance. Sproll's separation from his diocese, his refusal to resign to the then nuncio in Germany, Cesare Orsenigo, and his early and unwavering opposition to Nazi tyranny earned him the popular title of "Martyr Bishop". He himself summed up this period: As early as July 5, 1934, during a sermon at the Fulda Bishops' Conference, Sproll, according to Franz X. Schmid, provided inspiration for the drafting of Faulhaber's encyclical Mit brennender Sorge:
On October 4, 1938, amid the Sudeten Crisis, Sproll wrote to his diocesan flock: "A war more terrible than humanity has ever experienced has been averted from us." At a men's pilgrimage on September 19, 1939, Sproll made positive comments about Jews and their religion and negative remarks about the Kristallnacht pogrom.[3] On August 1, 1940, Archbishop Conrad Gröber of Freiburg and the Vicar General of the Diocese of Rottenburg, Max Kottmann, protested in Berlin on behalf of Sproll against the euthanasia program (the murder of the sick) at the NS killing center Grafeneck, one year before Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen of Münster publicly protested. On September 8, 1939, at the beginning of the Second World War, Sproll wrote in a pastoral letter: Despite these "disconcerting" words, the cleric and church historian Franz X. Schmid attests that Sproll was never a "war supporter or glorifier," but, as a "member of the Peace Association of German Catholics, an avowed pacifist."
In 1941, a papal envoy asked Sproll to resign. He refused, which Franz X. Schmid sees as the reason why Sproll was never properly honored by the Church after 1946. Sproll had become a "persona non grata."[4]