Reply #12: Catholic resistance fighters at Dachau...

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Memorial Site at Dachau

"Dachau can and shall be a lesson! Therefore we dare not be silent about it, although the memory of it is sad and grievous." Dr. Johannes Neuhäusler, Auxiliary Bishop of Munich and former Dachau inmate, June 17, 1960


"Never Again" in five languages on wall at International Monument

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/MemorialSite/index.html


Church of the Mortal Agony of Christ

Many first-time visitors to the former Dachau concentration camp are shocked, as I was, to find that the most prominent spot in the present-day Memorial Site is occupied by a Catholic Church. Since the first news reports about Dachau at the end of April 1945, the concentration camp has always been associated, in the minds of most people, with the death of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. On all three of my visits to the Dachau Memorial Site, I overheard several people commenting that they didn't think it was appropriate to have Christian memorials at the site where so many Jews had suffered and died. Actually, the majority of the prisoners at Dachau were Catholic, including many Polish, Italian and French inmates. They were not sent to Dachau because of their religious beliefs, but because they were anti-Nazi resistance fighters. When the American liberators arrived at Dachau on April 29, 1945, the majority of the prisoners in the camp were Polish Catholics. According to the US Army census, there were 2,539 Jews in the camp, most of them having arrived in the last days and weeks of the war, after being evacuated from other camps.

In addition, numerous Russian Prisoners of War, who were Russian Orthodox Catholics, perished at Dachau. After 1940, all the Catholic priests, who had been imprisoned by the Nazis for resistance activities, were consolidated at the Dachau camp. A total of 2,579 Catholic clergymen were among the inmates at Dachau, including many anti-Nazi priests brought from Poland. Although the Catholic Church itself was not officially opposed to Hitler, himself a non-practicing Catholic, the majority of the prisoners who died in the camp were Roman Catholic.

The name of the Catholic chapel is Todeangst Christi. It is usually translated as Mortal Agony of Christ in English, although the literal translation of the German title would be Christ's Mortal Fear. The church was built in 1960 at the instigation of Dr. Johannes Neuhäusler, a former inmate of the camp who became a Bishop in Munich after the war. Neuhäusler was arrested in 1941 for breaking one of the laws of the Nazi government by publicly reading the critical writings of Cardinal Faulhaber, who opposed the Nazi regime. He was first taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin and then transferred to Dachau a few months later.

Continued @ http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/MemorialSite/Catholic.html