Appendix A
The Priests of Dachau
by William J. O'Malley, S.J.
For five years, Konzentrationslager Dachau, a short bicycle ride across the sodden moors northwest of Munich, was the site of the largest religious community in the world. Because many records were hurriedly burned as the American tanks approached in April 1945, the best estimate, based on clandestine lists kept by priest-prisoners in the work offices, is that 2,771 clergymen were interned at KZ Dachau — of whom at least 1,034 died in the camp. The 2,579 Catholic priests, lay brothers and seminarians came from 38 nations, from 134 dioceses and 29 religious orders and congregations. Their community included 109 Protestant, 30 Orthodox and two Moslem clergymen.
That figure, surprising as it might be, does not include the clergy or nuns shot or beheaded or tortured to death in squares and alleys and jails all over Europe. In the first 16 months of the war, 700 Polish priests died at the hands of the Nazis and 3,000 more were sent to concentration camps; more than half did not return. In Dachau, 868 Polish priests perished — 300 of them in medical experiments or by torture in the prison showers. In France, too, by February 1944, the Gestapo had arrested 162 priests, of whom 123 were shot or decapitated before ever reaching any camp. According to the International Tribunal at Nuremburg, 780 priests died of exhaustion at Mauthausen and 300 at Sachsenhausen, and there were hundreds of other camps and satellites in the network. Nor does the total figure of 2,771 take into consideration that one-quarter to one-third of those shipped to any camp often arrived dead.
The Polish clergy in Dachau (1,780) far outnumbered the others. They arrived first, and most of the 830 who survived did so, unbelievably, for five years. As for the Czech and Slovak priests (109) and the Yugoslavs (50), the reason for incarceration was, as with the Jews, racial. Hitler believed Slavs were ordained by Providence to be slaves to the Aryan race, a fact their very name "proved." Any Slav who had achieved an education had, by that fact, flown in the face of his own nature. Moreover, these priests were not only educated Slavs but apostles of a church that Hitler had vowed to "crush like a toad" when final victory arrived.
The German and Austrian clergy at Dachau (447) were for the most part men who realized that being a good Christian and a good Nazi were as irreconcilable as compassion and sadism. These men, being celibate, were freer than family men to take risks. They had run underground presses and underground railways to rescue retarded children from the euthanasia laws and Jews from deportation. Any priest was free to defy the Pulpit Law and speak out against the racism and paganism of the Third Reich, but except for the redoubtable Bishop Von Galen of Muenster it would be his final public word. German priests and pastors were exiled to Dachau for preaching love of neighbor, for insisting that Jesus was a Jew, for warning S.S. men that they could not abjure their faith to achieve promotion, for offering requiem Masses even for relatives of Communists. German religious were interned on trumped-up-charges of spiriting funds out of the country to their headquarters in Rome and, in much publicized cases, for seducing boys and girls. Two old priests were sent to Dachau for failing to give the Hitler salute when Hermann Goering and his entourage entered a Berlin restaurant. All the Gestapo needed was to present a paper to any priest: "Evidence confirmed by the State police shows that by his behavior he is endangering the stability and security of the State."
The 156 French, 63 Dutch, and 46 Belgians were primarily interned for their work in the Underground. If that were a crime, such men as Michel Riquet, S.J., surely had little defense; he was in contact with most of the leaders of the French Resistance and was their chaplain, writing forthright editorials for the underground press, sequestering Jews, POW's, downed Allied airmen, feeding and clothing them, providing them with counterfeit papers and spiriting them into Spain and North Africa. Henry Zwaans, a Jesuit secondary school teacher in The Hague, was arrested for distributing copies of Bishop Von Galen's homilies and died in Dachau of dropsy and dysentery. Jacques Magnee punished a boy for bringing anti-British propaganda into the Jesuit secondary school at Charleroi in Belgium; Leo DeConinck went to Dachau for instructing the Belgian clergy in retreat conferences to resist the Nazis. Parish priests were arrested for quoting Pius XI's anti-Nazi encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge, or for publicly condemning the anti-Semitic film, "The Jew Seuss", or for providing Jews with false baptismal certificates. Some French priests at Dachau disguised themselves as workers to minister to young Frenchmen shanghaied into service in German heavy industry and had been caught doing what they had been ordained to do.
There is little need to rehearse the conditions of their lives in the camp. It was a hell before which Dante would stand mute. A good day was one on which you'd been beaten to your knees only once or twice; one small wad of bread and a cup of watery soup; 12 hours of hard labor, dragging the corpses to the roll call each morning and evening; warehoused at night in tiers, sleeping three to each lice-infested bunk; lugging one's soul from place to place in the fellowship of zombies; the cold, the filth, the endless degrading "hazing", the typhus, the inhuman joy when your best friend was beaten senseless and you were ignored. For some, hell lasted five years of days.
In 1940, it seemed a diplomatic coup that the German bishops and the Vatican had persuaded Heinrich Himmler to concentrate all priests from the network of European camps into one camp, to house them in separate blocks together, with lighter work and a chapel. In early December 1940, priests already interned in Dachau were put into Barracks 26, 28 and 30 at the end of the west side of the long camp street, "Liberty St.". Within two weeks they were joined by 800-900 more from Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Auschwitz and other camps, a Babel of haggard strangers. With the conquest of Western Europe, arrests of priests increased so that, now concentrated into two barracks instead of three, despite the deaths, they were rarely fewer than 1,500 men in beds and toilet facilities built for 360. Hardly any priests remained in the other camps.
Priests from Dachau worked in the "Plantation" and in the enormous S.S. industrial complex immediately to the west of the camp. In February 1942, two groups of younger Polish priests and scholastics were chosen for work as carpenters' apprentices, but they had actually been chosen (at the express order of Heinrich Himmler) to be injected with pus to study gangrene or to have their body temperature lowered to 27 degrees Centigrade in order to study resuscitation of German fliers downed in the North Atlantic. The Rev. Andreas Reiser, a German, was crowned with barbed wire and a group of Jewish prisoners was forced to hail him as their king, and the Rev. Stanislaus Bednarski, a Pole, was hanged on a cross.
Although a few priests did throw themselves in despair on the electrified wire and a few did sink into the affectless, zombie Nirvana the prisoners called "going Muslim," most clung to a faith that kept them plodding on. They had been schooled to a charity that was often strained, even with their fellow clergy, by national and ethnic differences. They could communicate at least in Latin across language barriers that divided other prisoners. They were educated men used to using their wits and to taking charge. In early 1943, when the tide of the war began to turn against Germany, and the need to get all the labor possible out of the slaves became clear to the camp commander, the S.S. saw that it was better to have disciplined, educated secretaries and managers. This allowed priests into offices where they could manipulate labor schedules, into the hospital where they could minister to the sick, especially during the two horrifying typhus winters, into the package depot where they made sure that packages (now allowed to ease the food shortage) got to the most needy, especially the Russians who obviously had no packages at all, and into the munitions factories where they could work minor sabotage, particularly with the planned gas oven at Dachau — which never became functional due, at least in part, to their efforts.
But most important to them, they had their chapel. At first, it was a single empty room with two tables shoved together for an altar and the contents of two army chaplains' Mass kits for vestments and vessels. In five years they managed to jerry-rig, "liberate" and sneak in through the Plantation roadstand the elements of a quite creditable chapel. It was to focus their minds and raise their spirits. And when eight months after the chapel opened, the Polish priests were moved to another barrack and forbidden entrance, hosts and wine were spirited to them; from both barracks, the Eucharist spread throughout the camp in tins that had held aspirin and zinc ointment and tobacco. Their greatest triumph, in December of 1944, was the ordination as priest of a young deacon of the diocese of Muenster, Karl Leisner, by his fellow-prisoner, Bishop Gabriel Piquet of Clermont-Ferrand — with full vestments made from material "liberated" from the stores, even a biretta for the ordained, a miter and red shoes for the bishop and a ring and pectoral cross made by a Communist inmate in the Messerschmitt works at Allach — and the S.S. never found out.
The most admirable priest-rogue was a Jesuit former master of novices named Otto Pies. Released from Dachau in the Spring of 1945 as the Americans were advancing, he disguised himself as an S.S. officer and came back to the camp with a truckload of food — rousted God knows where in those bitterly foodless days. He drove into the camp, into the priests' wired-off compound, and then drove off with 30 of the priests hidden in the back. Two days later, when 5,400 prisoners — 88 of them priests — were led off into the Alps to be lost in the snow, Otto Pies came back in the same uniform and truck and picked up more.
For such men, Mass was neither duty nor routine. Father Riquet describes a "Mass" he offered at Mauthausen before being moved to Dachau. They had no wine, but in the corner of a barrack, a dozen men squatted in rags as Riquet read the Epistle and Gospel of the day, recited the Our Father and gave them his blessing. At the end, with tears in his eyes, M. Jaspar, the consul general of Belgium, whispered: "That was the most beautiful Mass of my life."
It is important to keep these men's memory alive. As far as I know, there are no Auschwitzes today. But there is a shaming archipelago of Dachaus still in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, in South and Central America, in North and South Africa. We cannot say, "We never knew they were there." Although policy makers have many problems of the moment, the Jews have been admirably obstreperous — and successful — in their concern for the tragedy of interned Soviet Jews. What of the others? I hear the voice of the Common Man in A Man for All Seasons, playing Thomas More's jailer: "You've got to understand, sir. I'm just a plain, simple man." More groans in despair, "Sweet Jesus! These plain, simple men!"