The Priest Barracks: Dachau, 1938-1945

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Dachau could have been imagined by Dante, if Dante could have imagined hell being brought to Earth and staffed by Germans rather than demons. The author of this book, Guillaume Zeller, powerfully presents the facts of the daily existence of the inmates of Dachau. Zeller presents in detail the multitudes of torture, suffering, and humiliations concocted by the Nazis to strip human dignity from detainees. Thus, we hear about how prisoners were starved, worked to exhaustion, used for hideous experiments that infected prisoners with gangrene, and sent away to Hartheim Castle for euthanasia when they were considered unable to work.

The focus of the book is on the three blocks – out of thirty – that were dedicated to housing Catholic priests and some Protestant ministers, Orthodox priests and even two Muslim clerics of Albanian descent. 2,720 clergymen were sent to Dachau, including 2,579 Catholics, 109 Protestant ministers, 22 Greek Orthodox and 2 Muslims. 1,034 priests died in Dachau. Most of the priests were Polish, but there were 447 German priests and a number of other priests from occupied Europe.

The priests were brought together in Dachau because of the intervention of the papal legate who sought to consolidate priests in a single location, presumably so that their treatment could be monitored. Dachau was treated as a parish itself and had the bishops necessary to secretly and legally ordain a Catholic seminarian.

Priests were treated harshly by the Nazis. There is a popular canard that the Catholic Church supported the Nazis. This is entirely false, of course. Zeller notes:

“Christians quickly became the targets of the authorities and their police. Fifteen thousand establishments were closed. Religious associations were gradually suppressed.14 While Catholic youth associations were compelled to disband because of repeated harassment, enrollment in the Hitlerjugend was made obligatory in 1936. The omnipresent Gestapo kept everything under surveillance,15 from processions to sermons from the pulpit. Several leading figures in German Catholicism were assassinated on June 30, 1934, during the Night of the Long Knives, such as Erich Klausener, director of Catholic Action; Fritz Beck, director of the Aid for Catholic Students in Munich; and the journalist Fritz Gerlich. The Church's reactions multiplied in response.”

Priests were also vulnerable to the cruelties of the common criminals and the Communists, who controlled the camp and vented their hatred on priests.

Prior to the election, the Church had opposed the Nazis:

“incompatibility. During the elections that followed, the results in favor of the Nazi Party (or NSDAP)4 were inversely proportional to the percentage of Catholics in the population.5 The conference of German bishops in Fulda made the Church's defiance official in August 1932: “It is inexcusable that many Catholics should join the National Socialist Party as long as the latter adheres to a religious and cultural program that is incompatible with Catholic doctrine”, we read in its conclusions.6 The Church feared the threat of the NSDAP looming over the youth activities, clubs, and professional organizations for which she was responsible. The memory of the Kulturkampf was still alive, and Catholics wanted to avoid a repetition of that episode.”

Zeller also offers some examples of the resistance of individual Catholic clergy to the Nazis. There is another canard where internet atheists will show pictures that they claim are Catholic priests and bishops giving the Hitler salute. Although these pictures are actually Lutheran bishops, the truth is that not giving the Hitler salute could result in a trip to Dachau. Zeller observes:

“Father Gustav Gôrsmann, dean in Gellenbeck in the Diocese of Osnabrück, was sent to Dachau on October 3, 1941, for having spoken to French prisoners.28 He had already had a police record for having recommended, on a card posted at the entrance to his rectory, the use of the traditional greeting Grüss Gott—which literally means, “May God greet you”, the equivalent of “Hello, good day”—instead of the obligatory Heil Hitler!”

Other examples of individual resistance leading to internment in Dachau include:

“In the months following the Anschluss, fourteen priests were arrested and sent to the camps.14 Among them were Matthias Spanlang, a priest in Sankt Martin im Innkreis, a village about twenty kilometers [twelve miles] from Braunau am Inn, the town where Hitler was born. Spanlang was from the countryside, a bit rough around the edges, and was a longtime opponent of Nazism, which he had denounced in his sermons and newspaper articles ever since the first militant Nazis burst into his parish in 1931. Arrested on May 24, 1938, he was imprisoned and then taken to Dachau. Father Otto Neururer, the twelfth child of a miller, was a priest serving in Gôtzens, to the west of Innsbruck, who met with a similar fate. His gentle gaze, supported by round wire-rimmed glasses, was combined with a temperament of steel. After persuading a young woman to decline a marriage proposal to a Nazi thirty years her senior, he was arrested on December 15, 1938, for “the desecration of Germanic marriage” and taken to Dachau in March 1939. He and Father Spanlang were transferred to Buchenwald on September 26, 1939. The two men converted a prisoner there, which got them convicted and hauled away to the disciplinary bunker. Although the circumstances surrounding the death of Father Spanlang remain unclear—he is said to have died on June 5, 1940, at the age of fifty-three—those surrounding the death of Father Neururer are well known: he was hanged by his feet and died after thirty-six hours of suffering on May 30, 1940, at the age of fifty-eight.”

Korbinian Aigner, a Bavarian priest, was arrested in November 1939 for having preached about the Fifth Commandment (“Thou shalt not kill”). Likewise:

“The slightest hint of defiance toward the regime led to immediate sanctions—a nd for many, to Dachau. Four hundred forty-seven German clergymen went to, passed through, or died in Dachau from 1940 to 1945, thus forming the second-largest priestly contingent of that camp, far behind the Poles. Ownership of a forbidden book, clippings from tendentious newspapers, personal letters critical of the regime, signs of religious proselytism: the Gestapo used every possible means to justify the incarceration of priests on whom they had kept dossiers, sometimes for years. The reasons mentioned in the files are sometimes strikingly inconsistent. Father Heinrich Hennen, assistant pastor at Holy Spirit Church in Münster, was arrested on November 20, 1941, for having declared in a sermon that there was no longer any objective book on Church history.27 Father Gustav Gôrsmann, dean in Gellenbeck in the Diocese of Osnabrück, was sent to Dachau on October 3, 1941, for having spoken to French prisoners.28 He had already had a police record for having recommended, on a card posted at the entrance to his rectory, the use of the traditional greeting Grüss Gott—which literally means, “May God greet you”, the equivalent of “Hello, good day”—instead of the obligatory Heil Hitler! Father Ludwig Braun, from the parish in Freyung am Wald (Diocese of Passau) was apprehended on January 15, 1942, and sent to Dachau on March 21 for “defeatism”, because he had expressed the opinion in a conversation that the front could be weakened by the enemy.29 Father Anton Lenferding, a priest from Frankfurt am Main (Diocese of Limburg), found himself at the camp because he had refused to marry a divorced woman who belonged to the Nazi Party.30 The reasons most frequently cited against priests in the camp records are the following: “Conduct detrimental to the interests of the State, illicit exercise of pastoral care,. . . illicit exercise of pastoral care to foreigners, harboring deserters, incited children against the State [sic], friend of Jews, refusal to give the Hitlerian salute, protesting against the marriage law established by the State,. . . eternal enemy of Germany”.”

This book is also interesting in that it gives Alfred Rosenberg's role in formulating Nazi anti-Christian ideology gets the attention it deserves:

“Nazi anti-Christian sentiment had its origins in more immediate sources too. The influence of Alfred Rosenberg was essential. Born in 1893 in Reval—present-day Tallinn, the capital of Estonia—he arrived in Munich in 1918 while fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution. There he met Hitler through the intermediary Dietrich Eckart,3 a kingpin of the Thule Society, which exerted a strong ideological influence on the DAP, the future Nazi Party. Rosenberg became a regular columnist and refined an ideology combining theories about Aryanism, an obsessive anti-Semitism, hatred of Marxism, a strong aversion to ecclesial institutions, and occultism. His theses were distilled in the Völkischer Beobachter, the official party organ of which he was the longtime editor-in-chief, and then formalized in The Myth of the Twentieth Century, a book that he completed around 1925 but was not published until 1930. According to the author, a people that came from the North, the Amorites, allegedly founded Jerusalem and “made up the Nordic stratum of future Galilee, in other words the ‘pagan circle' from which Jesus was to arise”.4 The message delivered by this super-Nordic hero was supposedly corrupted by artificial attempts to anchor it in the Old Testament and by the interpretations of Paul of Tarsus. “The great personality of Jesus Christ was loaded, immediately after his death, with a jumble of Near Eastern, Jewish and African life”, a deplorable distortion, according to the theoretician.5 Rosenberg denounced the concept of original sin that appears in the Letters of Saint Paul and was formalized by Saint Augustine6 three centuries later. “The notion of original sin would have seemed incomprehensible to a people with an intact racial character. . . . Certainty that one is a sinner is a bastard's attitude”, he thought.7 According to Rosenberg, Christ is a major but not central figure in the history of civilization. On the other hand, the Church, through its expansion, is responsible for the internationalization of the “Jewish national uprising”.8 If Judaism is (to use the Nazi metaphors) a “pathogenic bacillus” threatening civilization, the Catholic Church and the Protestant churches are the carriers of it. The institution of a “positive Christianity”, in this perspective, necessarily leads to the eradication of ecclesial institutions. Thus it is difficult to see what can remain of Christianity, even in the “positive” variety, in the Nazi Weltanschauung.”

The book ends with some interesting insights into the role that Dachau played in fostering ecumenism. Dachau forced the breaking down of the walls that had previously existed between Catholicism and other faith communities by the fact that common survival could not be found if Protestants and Catholics continued to isolate themselves from each other.

This is an interesting and educational book that treats the subject factually and fairly and serves to correct some false impressions that might exist.