Silesia and the Schwenkfelders

Caspar Schwenckfeld

Caspar Schwenckfeld von Ossig was born in 1489 or 1490 at Ossig, a village near Lüben in the Duchy of Liegnitz. He was a nobleman who served as an adviser at the ducal court from 1511 to 1523, and he became one of the earliest voices for the Protestant Reformation in Silesia.

He soon parted ways with Martin Luther. In 1525 he rejected Luther's view of the Lord's Supper, teaching instead that true believers feed on Christ spiritually. He also put the inner life of faith ahead of outward forms, and he questioned infant baptism. To spare his duke from pressure, he left Silesia in 1529 and never came home. He lived in Strasbourg and later in Swabia, writing a great deal and moving often, and he died at Ulm on December 10, 1561.

Schwenckfeld never wanted to found a church. His followers called themselves Confessors of the Glory of Christ, a name taken from one of his books. Others called them Schwenkfelders.

A quiet faith in the Silesian hills

After his death, small groups of followers lived in southern Germany and in Silesia. By the end of the Thirty Years' War in 1648, only the Silesian circle remained. These were farmers, weavers, and village tradespeople living in a cluster of villages southwest of Liegnitz, near the town of Goldberg: Harpersdorf, Armenruh, Langneundorf, Lauterseiffen, Probsthain, and their neighbors.

They met in homes, read Schwenckfeld's writings, and copied books and hymns by hand. They were not allowed their own churches, and as so-called heretics they were often refused burial in the parish churchyards. Families carried their dead out at night, without bells or procession, and buried them along the cattle paths at the edge of the fields. In 1863 a stone called the Viehweg Monument was raised near Harpersdorf to honor those buried this way.

By the early 1700s only a small community still held to the tradition, most of them in and around Harpersdorf.

The Jesuit mission

Silesia was then ruled by the Habsburg emperors in Vienna, who were Catholic. In 1719 the imperial government sent a Jesuit mission to Harpersdorf to bring the Schwenkfelders into the Catholic Church. It was led by two priests, Johann Milahn and Carolus Xavier Regent. What began with preaching turned to fines, prison terms, and pressure on families to have their children baptized and raised in the state church. Some men were held in the castle at Gröditzberg. According to local tradition, a Catholic chapel in Harpersdorf was even built with money from the fines.

The families sent representatives to Vienna to plead for toleration. One of them, Balthasar Hoffman, spent about five years there and delivered many petitions to the court, but nothing came of it.

The flight of 1726

Leaving was not legal, so it had to be done quietly. The first to go was a widow, Barbara Merckel, with her four children, in October 1725. On the night of February 14, 1726, seven more families slipped across the border into Saxony, heading for Görlitz and the village of Berthelsdorf. Then, on the Saturday night after Easter in 1726, the rest followed. They walked away from their farms and houses with what they could carry on their backs or push in wheelbarrows.

Accounts give somewhere around 170 families, or more than 500 people, who left in these months. Their refuge was Upper Lusatia, just to the west, then part of the Electorate of Saxony. Some settled in the city of Görlitz, while many found shelter on the estates of the young Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf at Berthelsdorf, next to the new Moravian settlement of Herrnhut. They would stay there about eight years before moving on to Pennsylvania.

What came after

In 1742, after Prussia took Silesia from Austria, King Frederick II offered toleration to the Schwenkfelders and invited them back. A few returned, but most had already crossed the ocean. The faith slowly faded in its homeland, and the last Schwenkfelder in Harpersdorf died in 1826.

At the end of the Second World War in 1945, the German-speaking people of these villages were expelled and the region became part of Poland. Harpersdorf is now Twardocice, in Złotoryja County. Descendants still travel there to see the Viehweg Monument and the ruins of the old Lutheran refuge church in the village.