Appendix B
Priests of the Holocaust
by William J. O’Malley, S.J.
Somehow the Nazi genocide associated with the word "Holocaust" focuses primarily on those who died in extermination camps.
If the word "genocide" means the deliberate extermination of a national or racial group, the six million tragic Jewish victims surely qualify. However, so do the nine to ten million Slavic victims who were eliminated — not in the war, not as saboteurs, not as guerrillas, but solely because they were Slavic. One might also argue the case of the half million gypsies and perhaps even the thousands of homosexuals executed because they were not the virile Aryans Hitler considered the only members of the true human race.
Hitler believed Providence intended Slavs to be serfs to the godlike Aryans; after all, medieval Latinists had used the word sclavus for both slaves and Slavs. Thus all educated Slavs, especially members of a clergy Hitler had vowed to "crush like a toad" after the war, were to be liquidated — by a year or two of humbling starvation and slavery. As Martin Bormann put it: "All Polish intelligentsia must be exterminated. This sounds cruel, but such is the law of life. . . .(Polish priests) will preach what we want them to preach. If any priest acts differently, we will make short work of him. The task of the priest is to keep the Poles quiet, stupid, and dull-witted."
Ten thousand Poles were liquidated in the first four months of the occupation. Seven hundred Polish priests were shot, and 3,000 were sent to camps, where 2,600 of them died. The majority perished slowly and methodically from medical experiments and starvation labor — compared to which a quick, horrible death in a gas chamber might have seemed a perverse kind of mercy.
In the first week of December, 1940, the SS consolidated the 1,197 priests from all the concentration and execution camps in Europe into a single camp: Dachau — where they could be tightly controlled. They were housed in two barracks, 26 and 28, ringed with a barbed-wire fence — a camp within the camp — so they would be less able to act as priests during their few free hours. By the day of liberation, 2,720 priests, brothers, and seminarians from 134 dioceses and 29 religious orders had dragged out their lives in Konzentrationzlager Dachau. Over 1,000 died there.
These numbers do not, of course, include priests executed in their towns and cities; of 162 French priests arrested by the Gestapo in February, 1944, for instance, 123 were shot or guillotined before reaching any camp. Nor does it count those priests who lived and died in other camps; the International Tribunal at Nuremburg said that 780 priests died of exhaustion in the quarries of KZ Mauthausen alone. Nor does it consider that one-quarter to one-third of those shipped to any camp were often dead on arrival.
The Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, and Yugoslavs, of course, were killed for the same satanic reason as the Jews: race, coupled with achieving an education and association with a Jewish-founded Christianity which Hitler despised for its attempts to effeminize Aryan males with doctrines of mercy and love.
Those from the occupied countries had run escape routes for downed Allied airmen, published underground newspapers, disguised Jews as nuns, seminarians, and Christian orphans, issued false baptismal certificates. Abbe Maury of Nancy was arrested because the Gestapo had found his notice in every French concentration camp: "If ever you are in need of a Good Samaritan, here is my address."
For German priests, refusal to bow to the Third Reich was not only resistance but treason, especially during the war. With the complete suppression of the Catholic press, priests went underground, duplicating the sermons of the redoubtable Bishop von Galen of Muenster exhorting the people to resist the pagan racism of the Nazi regime. Any priest was free to defy the Pulpit Law, but it would be his final public word. As the figures above attest, several hundred German and Austrian priests took that risk contrary to the view held even by eminent historians that the German Church was embarrassingly, shamefully silent.
Dachau opened in 1933, and its first inmates were Communists, criminals, and other "enemies of the state." Consequently, when the priests arrived, these toughs were by then the trusties of the camp, in sadistic charge of the barracks and the work crews. Every morning at 4:30, the Kapos rousted the prisoners from their bunks where they slept from three to five men on a shelf two-and-a-half- feet wide, for a quick wash — about 275 men at sinks and latrines intended for 50 prisoners, a tepid cup of ersatz coffee, and thence to the endless roll call. Until midway through the war, even the corpses had to be present.
From roll call, prisoners trudged off to the enormous plantation to the east of the camp and to the SS industrial complex to the west of it. In winter, they removed every speck of snow, even from roofs; if there were not enough shovels, they reversed their thin zebra-striped jackets as scoops; they slept in the cold, wet clothes, since each man had only one uniform.
As the war turned and manpower became crucial, the commandant seconded prisoners to nearby industries. BMW in Allach, for instance, employed 3,800 Dachau prisoners, and four Messerschmidt factories accounted for 5,600 more. Manpower meant Reich Marks.
Around noon, watery soup and in the evening thin soup and a wad of bread which the prisoner could wolf down or save to becalm his hunger pains long enough to get to sleep dangerous, however, since bread was the principal currency of the camp. All prisoners were emaciated down to about one-third their former weight.
Punishment was frequent, often for no observable reason. As one Dachau commandant said, "Softies belong in a monastery, not in the SS." With priests, Jews, and Russians, the SS could do anything, absolutely anything. One young SS man took a great interest in Father Andreas Rieser, who seemed incapable of being broken. One day, after beating Rieser through the camp, the SS man stopped by a group of old Jews dismantling rusted barbed wire entanglements. He looked at the bruised, sweating priest and laughed, "You look like Christ!" he howled, and picked up a length of barbed wire and began whipping Rieser with it. "Braid yourself a crown," he snapped. The young trooper hammered the crown onto the priest's head and forced the old Jews to spit on him. "That's how you treated Christ," he laughed. "A stinking Jew, just like you."
Old-time prisoners convinced newcomers to go without their glasses, since most of the camp personnel had no time for intellectuals, especially for priests. Guards and Kapos carried truncheons and used them gratuitously. Tower guards had orders to shoot any prisoner too near the fence, out of line, speaking during roll call, or within three feet of an SS man.
The principal means of serious punishment was the Bock, a table to which the prisoner was tied while 25 or "twice-25" was applied to his buttocks with an ox-whip in front of the 40,000 inmates. The prisoners had to count the strokes audibly; if he was unable to speak, the counting began from the start. Then his open wounds were treated with iodine, and he was ordered to do several deep knee-bends to prove himself still fit.
More clandestine punishment occurred, especially to secure information, in the camp showers where the prisoners bathed and were deloused once a month. A guard wired the prisoner's thumbs behind his back and threw the end of the wire over the shower pipes, raising the prisoner off his feet and letting him dangle in agony until he supplied the needed answers.
But the haunting fear was of falling ill — with diarrhea, enteritis, edema, and especially typhus, which raged through the camp the two final winters, then 200-300 died each day. Only one sign in the camp told the truth: "One louse means death." Each night the prisoners carefully deloused their clothing, finding sometimes 100 vermin. But often they were simply too exhausted, and they ended in the dreaded infirmary, burning with thirst and screaming with fever. When the SS refused to enter the contagious wards, 20 priests volunteered, bathing the victims' bodies with Lysol and stacking their bodies in the alleys, like cordwood.
Several barracks served as laboratories for medical experiments. Dr. Klaus Schilling injected inmates with malaria, tuberculosis, and pus to study the effects of various drugs — or no drugs. His favorite subjects were Polish priests and seminarians between the ages of 20 and 45 — at least 140 of them had their death certificates completed before the experiments even began.
Dr. Sigmund Rascher locked prisoners into tanks from which all the oxygen was slowly withdrawn, to study methods of aiding Luftwaffe airmen whose pressurized cabins were damaged at high altitudes. Other inmates were covered with ice and once an hour sluiced with cold water to test methods of reviving airmen downed in the North Sea.
Despite the starvation, the dawn-to-dusk workdays and the harassment, these men managed to wangle a dormitory as a chapel which they slowly adorned with bits and pieces liberated from here and there in a form of "occult compensation": vestments, draperies, a monstrance made from empty fish cans. When Bishop Gabriel Piguet of Clermont-Ferrand was imprisoned in Dachau, the priests succeeded in ordaining a young German seminarian, Karl Leisner, who was dying of tuberculosis — with full vestments, biretta, miter, a crozier and ring for the bishop, made in the Messerschmidt factory — and the SS never found out.
Communion radiated out through the camp in aspirin tins and cigarette packets. Priests heard the confessions of workers who squatted next to them weeding on the plantation.
Every night at the wire surrounding the priests' barracks, starving prisoners whined the names of priests they knew could be counted on for a bit of bread. When two priests got jobs in the package depot, they distributed parcels to the worst cases, especially to the Russians.
Former university professors set up classes in theology for seminarians. Each year the priests made an eight-day retreat — the points for meditation typed and mimeographed in the job office; every Sunday evening, a seminar: the Church after the war, the human development of the priest, adaptation of the apostolate to the real life from which their priestly position had so long insulated them but which they now so painfully had rediscovered.
Perhaps there is a reason the lives and deaths of these quite surely saintly men should exclude them as authentic victims of the Holocaust.
But if the Holocaust taught us anything, it surely taught us the idiocy of inflexible dividing lines: nationalism, denominationalism, racism, sexism. Of course our ethnic, national, religious traditions are a source of rootedness, identity, and community. But not when it ceases to be a matter of honest pride and corrodes into divisiveness and bitterness.
There is only one race: the human race. All other divisions must yield to that all-inclusive un-division. At the first Christmas, their was room in the stable, so the legend goes, for Jewish shepherds and for three kings — one white, one black, one yellow. The Holocaust was an affront not merely to Jews, or to Slavs, but to the one race we all share, In the Kingdom of the one Father we also share, there are many mansions. Some are crowned with stars, others with crosses. But He dwells within them all.