(1859-1948)
President of the General Assembly of the Evangelical Church; an unequivocal opponent of both the Republic and the NSDAP. After studying classical languages and ju-risprudence, he accepted a position with the Bayerische Handelsbank. Highly successful, he joined the bank's board of managers in 1889 (a position he re-tained until 1937). Thereafter he served with several financial bodies, including the central committee of the Reichsbank.
Pechmann was politically active before World War I, serving as President of the Deutsche Reichspartei in Bavaria.* In 1919 he entered the Bavarian Landtag as a member of the BVP. But when the BVP helped draft the Weimar Constitution,* he resigned. He was selected to lead the Bavarian State Synod of the Evangelical Church in 1919 and then became the leading lay figure in Ger-many's largest Protestant* body when he was elected President of the church's General Assembly (Kirchentag) in 1921. He served concurrently on the standing committee of the Lutheran World Conference.
Pechmann despised the Republic, claiming that it owed its existence to a political party whose atheistic and anti-clerical bias cannot seriously be doubted or disputed." He attacked a 1927 church declaration calling on everyone to obey God's word by supporting the constituted state, and in 1931 he implored the church to rebuff ecumenism so long as Germany was forced to suffer the "Versailler Diktat y Yet he was under no illusions regarding Hitler.* In March 1933 he begged the church to take a stand against the sea of hate and lies" that had descended upon Germany. During the April 1933 boycott of Jewish businesses he requested a public protest and demanded that the Evangelical Church make a categorical statement of support for Jewish citizens. In 1934, after futile attempts to get the church to act against anti-Semitism,* he an-nounced his decision to leave a Church that had stopped being a Church." He converted to Catholicism after World War II.
REFERENCES:Benz and Graml, Biographisches Lexikon; Scholder, Churches and the Third Reich; Wright, "Above Parties."
A Historical dictionary of Germany's Weimar Republic, 1918-1933. C. Paul Vincent.