BLESSED FATHER RICHARD HENKES – THE SECRET PREACHER OF DACHAU CONCENTRATION CAMP; 19th SEPTEMBER
BLESSED FATHER RICHARD HENKES – THE SECRET PREACHER OF DACHAU CONCENTRATION CAMP
19th SEPTEMBER
I have included this post as a memorial to the priests who died for their fellow man at the hands of the Nazis. Blessed Father Richard Henkes, a German Pallatine priest, was imprisoned at Dachau Concentration Camp for preaching against the Nazis. On this date, 19th September 2019, he was beatified. He was one of 18 priests who volunteered to go to the typhus block in Dachau, knowing that it was a sentence of death. He was called the ‘secret preacher of Block 17’, and he died while ministering to prisoners suffering from typhus.
At his beatification, Cardinal Kurt Koch stated that "[t]he real reformers of the Church are the blessed and the saints, for we can only achieve the utmost externally, in structural terms, when we are also prepared to strive to achieve our utmost internally, in faith.”
He continued, “Love is not without sacrifice. The Christian martyrdom is only real if it is realized as the supreme act of love for God and for one’s brothers and sisters.”
Courtney Mares, Catholic news Agency, 20 September 2019.
Father Henkes spoke out against the Nazi ideology from the pulpit and the classroom, condemning the regime’s crimes against human dignity - focusing one homily on their killing of the disabled. This “mercy killing” as it was termed, effected implementation of the Nazi program of eugenics, aimed at eliminating the unfit in their pursuit of an atheism grounded upon Darwinian survival of the fittest – a science devoid of moral limitations in their quest to take the place of God - to create the Aryan super race.
The report by the Catholic News Agency provides as follows:
“Father Henkes was repeatedly interrogated by the Gestapo as he continued to work as a retreat master and chaplain. ‘In the face of this neo-pagan ideology, Father Henkes surmised that wherever God is reduced to insignificance and pushed out of the public eye, man is also reduced to insignificance,’ Koch said.
‘Only when God is exalted through us human beings, when we do what Mary did in the Magnificat- Magnifact anima mea: Let God be exalted through my soul- wherever that takes place, there man is not reduced to insignificance, but is given a share in the greatness of God’s love,” the Cardinal said.
Father Henkes was arrested by the Gestapo in May 1943 because of the content of one of his homilies in Branitz. He was imprisoned in Dachau, where he lived in the priests’ barracks, did compulsory labour and secretly preached in Block 17.
In late 1944, a typhus epidemic overtook Block 17. Father Henkes volunteered to be locked up with the sick prisoners, so that he could continue to minister to them and care for the dying. After eight weeks in the quarantined barracks, Father Henkes became infected with typhus. He died on February 22 1945. Allied forces liberated Dachau concentration camp on 29 April 1945.
Ruthless persecution of the churches, and, in particular, the Catholic Church, was the hallmark of the Nazi rule from the time of their accession to power in Germany and, with increasing severity, in Czechoslovakia and Poland. A little over one month after the Nazi seizure of power in Germany, Fritz Gerlich, the Editor of the Catholic newspaper Der gerhade Weg, was imprisoned at Dachau, where he was murdered and cremated in 1934. His ashes were sent to his wife in an envelope. Any moral or political opposition to the Nazi totalitarianism was brutally suppressed - prior to the elections in 1932, the Catholic party of Germany, ("Zentrum"), was annihilated, its members murdered or intimidated. The head of Catholic Action was arrested and murdered in the night of the Long Knives in 1934, along with other members of Catholic groups.The Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939. By the end of October 1939, of 700 priests in the Diocese of Gnesen-Posen, 451 were in prison, 36 missing and 74 executed or sent to concentration camps. Over 3,000 members of the Polish clergy were killed, 1,992 of them dying in concentration camps. Of the 2,720 clergy sent to Dachau, (“the Priests’ Barracks”), 2,579 were Catholic priests, along with uncertain numbers of seminarians and lay brothers. 1,748 of these were Polish priests, of whom 868 died in the camp. There were 478 German Catholic priests. Altogether, in Dachau, 1,034 priests died.
The priests were housed in a special “priests block” and were targeted for brutal treatment by the guards. In 1942 the authorities of Dachau offered the priests the possibility of special treatment on the condition of them declaring that they belonged to the German nation. Not one came forward.
It is estimated that at least 3,000 priests were sent to other concentration camps, including Auschwitz, while priests from across Europe were condemned to death and labour camps: 300 priests died at Sachsenhausen, 780 at Mauthausen and 500 at Buchenwald. Several thousand nuns were also sent to camps or died on the way.
*Peter Bartley, Catholics Confronting Hitler.
In recent modern history, there has arisen a false history, perpetrated by the media and some who self-reference themselves as ‘scholars’, whereby the role of the Catholic Church as an implacable opponent of Nazism and as the main instrument of rescue of the victims of Nazism, is completely ignored, and, rather, is replaced by a distortion in which the Catholic Church, (which, in fact, bore the highest tally of victims of the Nazis), is sought to be conflated with the perpetrators. In this revised narrative, Pope Pius XII, the Pope who was described by Israeli historian and diplomat, Pinchas Lapide,* as well as the Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Rabbi Hertzog, the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Rabbi Zolli, and the New York Times, as ‘the only western leader who spoke’ against the Nazi atrocities, is recast as the one who remained silent about the treatment of the Jews. In this new story, the western powers, with their appeasing leaders, their silence and their failure to admit refugees, are let off, while ‘scholarly' attention is directed by a complicit media to false factual rabbit holes disingenuously framed with feigned puzzlement, such as;
“Was the holocaust of the Jews known by Pope Pius XII?” - he personally hid Jewish refugees in the Vatican, so, yes, he did know. Or;
“Why was Pope Pius XII anti-Semitic?” Well, he spoke fluent Hebrew, learnt from his best friend’s family, Orthodox Jews, whom he smuggled out of the country, along with thousands of other Jews smuggled out of Europe and hidden at his orders in Catholic monasteries and convents. His personal chambers in the Vatican were used as a birthing centre for the children born from the Jewish refugees hidden in the Vatican so, the (genuine) question is not ”Why?”, but “Was he?” Because not only was he not anti-Semitic, he actually did stuff.
Or;
Confected discussions based upon fabricated assumptions such as, “Why did he remain silent?” - hmm, he wasn’t silent; in fact, when he was nuncio, before he was Pope, of 44 speeches he gave, 40 absolutely denounced Nazism. (And the ‘scholars’ can’t find these speeches?)
The fact that some Nazis, avowed and aggressive atheists, had once been baptized Catholics, has been used to bolster an animus by which Nazism is portrayed as an offshoot or consequence of the Catholic faith, instead of what it really was, a group who were, as the future Pope Pius XII described them in 1935,
“only miserable plagiarisers who dress up ancient errors in new tinsel. It matters little whether they rally round the flag of social revolution, whether they are guided by a false concept of the world and of life, or whether they are possessed by the superstition of a race and blood cult.”
Catholics, a minority in Germany, overwhelming voted against the Nazi party in the 1933 elections, with 84 per cent of Catholics voting against Hitler. Catholic areas, including Bavaria, Aachen and Coblenz-Trier, voted against Hitler 3-1; Protestant areas voted in favour of Hitler as Chancellor.
The Catholic Church had made it clear since 1919 that the Nazi ideology was incompatible with Catholicism, the German bishops ruling up until the election that membership of the Nazi Party entailed excommunication.
The Pope whom the SS newspaper, De Sturmer, called, “the Jew-loving Pope”, who was targeted by the Nazis for assassination, is now called ‘sympathetic’ to Nazism. The person who protected the Jews and facilitated the escape of thousands is blamed for the actions of a totalitarian regime that persecuted and murdered millions of the Catholic faithful and many thousands of priests.
The very first encyclical of Pope Pius XII, on his election as Pope, was such a powerful denunciation of the Nazi ideology, that the Allies airdropped 88,000 copies over Germany as propaganda. It is highly likely that priests of the calibre of Father Henkes were inspired by the courage of the Pontiff in their resistance to the Nazi extermination program of human beings deemed outside the super- race.
In their counterfeit presentation, absolutely no attention is directed by the western media and their ‘scholars’, to this encyclical, or to the thousands of pages of documentary evidence, recorded in contemporaneous newspaper reports by mainly Jewish and secular press, of the statements and actions taken by the Catholic Church, her Pope and the clergy and religious under him, against the Nazi ideology. No study is made by the ‘scholars’ in their hours spent in the ‘Secret Archives’ of the Vatican, of the records detailing the courageous acts of clergy and religious in speaking out, in rescuing and hiding Jews, frequently for years, at the risk of their lives and the lives of the whole community. Neither is mention made that it was the very structure of the Church that facilitated the networks of Catholic contacts such that the refugees were able to be spirited to safety. They seem unaware (or, fail to mention), that the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra requested to play for Pope Pius XII as a show of their gratitude for his actions in regard to the Jewish people. The fact that all the ‘scholars’ seem unaware or unable (or unwilling), to locate the photographs and newspaper reports of this performance, even though it is in the archives of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, is somewhat telling. As the musicians were survivors of persecution, and as the performance was given in 1956, within immediate memory of the War, claims of Nazi sympathies and anti-Semitism, either by the Pope personally or in regard to the Catholic faith generally, not only defame the memories of those brave people who risked their lives, but also diminish the integrity and dignity of these Jewish musicians, themselves victims of Nazi persecution, who recognised and paid tribute to their actions.
Any person interested in reading the reports of the newspapers of the time, including Jewish newspapers and secular newspapers, can access them on the web-site of a group called, “Pave the Way” – a site started by a New York Jewish businessman, Gary Krupp, who discovered the falsity of the legend perpetrated against Pope Pius XII and who, in countering the false media by the simple method of posting the original documents, has attempted to give effect to the Jewish directive of gratitude.
Jewish leaders who had witnessed the suffering of their people at first hand during the War and up to and after his death, praised Pope Pius XII as the person who, in the face of the ruthless elimination of any opposition by the Nazis, had mobilised the members of the Church and the Catholic faithful to act, at the risk of their lives and the lives of their families and communities, in a massive rescue. The result of the concerted action by the network of the Catholic faithful was estimated by the Israeli diplomat and historian, Pinchas Lapide, who personally interviewed Holocaust survivors, to be the saving of 700,000 to 860,000 lives “from certain death at Nazi hands”. Those rescued by the Catholic Church, according to Lapide, exceeded the total number of all rescues by the western powers and the Red Cross combined.
Estimates place the number of Polish civilians killed in the war at between 5 and 5.5 million, (some estimates at 8 million), including about 3 million Polish Jews and about 2-3 million Polish gentiles, mainly Catholics, (again, some say up to 5 million). Lapide recorded that even as the Polish Catholics were being crushed, Catholic clergy and religious saved possibly as many as 50,000 Jews. The highest proportion of Jewish rescues, (and the highest number of “Righteous Gentiles” named in the Yad Vashem rescue of Jews during the War), was conducted by Poles, despite the fact that the penalty for hiding them was instant execution. In considering the extent of the bravery of these people, it must be remembered that the Nazis were winning then - an overpowering war machine that appeared to be unstoppable, resistance to which entailed execution as well as retribution to family, community and whole villages.
Lapide stated, as regards the clergy killed in saving their fellow man, or those people who died in opposing Hitler:
“If human brotherhood has any sense beyond the grave then these failures have not died in vain. Rabbi Arthur Gilbert eulogises all would-be rescuers when he writes;
‘These Catholic priests had looked upon the faces of their Jewish neighbours and recognised Jesus willingly sacrificed in an act of atoning love. In their opposition to Hitler they demonstrated that Christianity is not to be judged by the failure of a handful of Christians, just as Judaism should not be judged by the sinfulness of some Jews. Faith that calls upon God, the Creator of man in His own image, heals and reconciles man to his brother.’”
If these priests and religious did not die in vain, then it is incumbent upon us, as Catholics, to honour their memory by informing ourselves as to the facts, to correct the narrative that has been published by those with agendas and absent scruples.
The real story is one of which any Catholic can be justly proud - it is a story of true bravery of the leader of the Church and of her clergy. Pope Pius XII, the leader of the "smallest State in the world" as described by Lapide, a State with no army and only defended by the Swiss Guard in their Michaelangelo uniforms, was the one person who consistently spoke up. It was his integrity and moral courage that motivated the vast army of Catholic clergy and faithful to act against the tyranny of the Nazi extermination program, at risk to their lives and the lives of their families.
The tragedy and drama of World War II, and the story of Pius XII and his band of religious resistance was summed up by Pinchas Lapide:
“The beacon of moral light flickered dangerously in the winds of terror and degradation, but it did not fail. In the words of Sholem Asch, ‘On the flood of sin, hatred and blood let loose by Hitler upon the world, there swam a small ark which preserved intact the common heritage of the Judeo-Christian outlook; that outlook is founded on the love of God and love of one’s fellow men. The demonism of Hitler sought to overturn it in the flood of hate. It was saved by a handful of saints.’”
Pinchas Lapide, “Three Popes and the Jews” (1965), Hawthorn.
Peter Bartley, "Catholics Confronting Hitler", (2016), Ignatius
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