INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY - 27th JANUARY
INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY
27th JANUARY
The word ‘Holocaust’ is, at best, an inaccurate description for the mass murder by a totalitarian regime of innocent people: it connotes ‘sacrifice’ in propitiation to God, reminiscent of the holocausts offered by the Jewish people in the Temple and carried through to the Sacrifice of the Mass. The extermination of millions of people, however, was not an act of God, but of man; man who had turned his back on God and was, in many instances, demonic in his hatred of God and all who stood for Him. The Jewish people call the genocide committed on their people the “Shoah”.
However, today, in remembering that time as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we commemorate this terrible time of human history, a time when the ability to kill presented itself on an industrial scale; when the absence of God from men’s hearts enabled them to rationalize the perpetration of callous crimes against their fellow man in the interests of “science” and the pursuit of an ideology grounded in race, centred upon the worship of man. Estimates of the total death toll of World War II vary between 58 million to 74 million. Over six million Jewish people were murdered by virtue of their ethnicity and religion in pursuit of the national Socialist policy of racial eugenics. Approximately 10 million Catholics were murdered. (1)
The horror of the Jewish genocide is particularly so because of the racial origins of their persecution – a motivation shared in the persecution of the Polish: Estimates place the number of Polish civilians killed in the war at between 5 and 5.5 million, (some estimates at 8 million), including 2-3 million Polish Jews and about 2-3 million Polish gentiles, mainly Catholics. Over 3,000 members of the Polish clergy were killed, 1,992 of them dying in concentration camps. The German invasion of Poland in 1939 saw the immediate arrest and detention of a huge number of Polish clergy and the decimation of the Polish Church. The Poles, like the Jews, were designated for extermination on the basis of “racial purity” – the National Socialist categorisation of them as “Undermenschen” and less than human.
The Polish clergy were doubly victimized – for racial reasons as well as their vocation as Catholics and, worse, priests, (called ‘Pfaffe’ as a derogatory term). In 1942 many priests were removed from other concentration camps to Dachau, in which were established the “priests’ barracks”; altogether, 2,720 clergy were sent to Dachau, where 1,034 Catholic priests died. The majority of the Catholic priests, 1,748, were Polish. Polish priests had a mortality rate in Dachau at 10% more than the average, and were more often victims of direct intentional assassinations by the SS guards or the kapos, (prisoners who were given privileges in return for performing duties for the SS). The kapos were guards - used by the Nazis as a cheaper means of keeping order. They were inmates - criminals, (green triangles), and communists, sometimes different factions of the SS or SA who had been sidelined by the power play within the Nazi hierarchy. They had complete licence in their control of the priests’ barracks in their abuses and were more feared than the SS.
The priests were made subjects of medical experiments for the purposes of “science”, primarily malaria and phlegmon experiments in which they were infected with bacteria and then experimented upon with different drug regimes and gruesome physical treatments. The experiments were conducted under the supervision of Doctor Schilling, seventy-one years old, from February 1942, who received full latitude to conduct them. He was an “ill tempered old man wearing golf pants and a visor with a stubborn expression on his ruddy face and devoid of all empathy.” The inmates were infected with whatever the disease ‘science’ demanded and were then subjected to painful and useless treatment. Heinrich Himmler attended some sessions in person and followed the experiments closely.
The camp was subject to epidemics of typhus arising as a result of the cramped filthy conditions and terrible starvation to which they were subject.
“Confronted with endemic typhus the priests decided to intervene and started a new chapter in Christian solidarity. After several days of prayer Canon Auguste Daguzan chose, from volunteers, several priests to go to the aid of the sick and dying in the quarantined blocks. Going to those barracks required extraordinary courage and devotion since there was no question of them coming back once they walked through the door – death was a certainty. ‘The campaign consisted simply of being shut up in the barracks with the prisoners with typhus. Father Sommet, who volunteered but was not selected by Canon Daguzan, sums up the purpose as follows: ‘To live as living men in order to help the dying to die as living men.’’” (2)
While the internment of the priests in a specially designated camp meant some privileges, such as a chapel, they were also victims of particular moral and physical persecution that fed on the anti-Christian - and particularly anti-Catholic-foundations of the National Socialist ideology. They were also met with extreme hostility from the Kapos. Some of the rages, the expressions on their faces and the physical violence were so extreme as to be interpreted by the many of the priests as symptomatic of satanic possession: ‘Before Dachau I had never seen hatred: eyes blazing with wickedness, mouths contorted with anger at the sight of a Pfaffe. Striking, injuring, killing a ‘curate’ seemed to be an instinctive need for some of them,’ reported Father de Coninck. (3)
Another Jesuit, the Czech Alois Kolacek , who had arrived at the camp in November 1940, developed the habit of mentally reciting the prayers of exorcism when an SS guard entered the barracks, his face animated by an evil intention. Buffets, kicks and punches flew at the slightest pretext or without any reason at all - dealt by the SS and especially by the kapos. (4)
The punishments were especially spiteful with reference to the Catholic liturgical year. In Holy Week 1942, the camp commanders inflicted collective punishment on the priests in accordance with the liturgical season in a parody of the Catholic feast- the priests had to march and do exercises from morning roll call until evening – constantly for ten hours under the direction of the kapo, Fritz Becher. Elderly priests had to stand on one leg all day on ladders reciting Scripture or holy passages. (5)
One Capuchin friar was tortured by hanging by his wrists, which were bound behind his back, during which he was forced to recite liturgical responses. (6)
Father Andraes Rieser a Tyrolean priest, was forced by an SS guard to make a crown of barbed wire and to wear it. Some Jewish detainees summoned by the guard then had to dance around him, strike him and spit on him in a parody of the Passion account. Still crowned with the bloody diadem, Father Reiser was forced to push a heavy wheelbarrow around the camp all day. (7)
Fathers Kazimierz Grelewski and Josef Pawlowski, Polish priests, were hanged on 9 January 1942. The first, whose brother Stefan, also a priest, had died at Dachau on May 9 1941, was executed for making the sign of the cross and saying, ‘ May God forgive you,’ after being beaten by a kapo. The second refused to stomp on a crucifix. Father Grelewski, on the scaffold exclaimed to his executioners: ‘Love the Lord!’ before being hanged.
The SS and the kapos endeavoured to demoralize the priests by crude descriptions of real or imagined sexual exploits, constant vulgarity and flaunting homosexual relationships they had with Russian youths who prostituted themselves to them. The priests were subjected to random abuses, such as intimate inspections of their genitals in order to demean them. (7A)
Death was everywhere – but the priests nevertheless did not allow their hearts to be hardened against the humanity of those who died: every single death was given a full, if surreptitious, Requiem Mass. The death of French Jesuit, Victor Dillard, on 13 January 1945, who had been denounced and imprisoned as the clandestine chaplain of compulsory work labourers, was observed by a fellow priest: “The end of the Jesuit seemed imminent - Rykere sobbed like a baby when he showed me the priest, nude, stretched out with his arms crossed in the drainage channel where the bandages were floating.”(9)
The eugenics program, Aktion 4, had been brought in by the National Socialists under their racial improvement ideological stance, initially directed to Downs Syndrome children, (called ‘Auschkusskinder’-‘garbage children’), using the euphemism of “Mercy Killing” to invest the program with some degree of putative kindness or virtue. It advanced rapidly to embrace all those deemed not perfect, a nuisance, costly or unproductive. By the time of Dachau, it included elderly who were incapable of productive work and who were thereby a drain on the scant resources of food in the camp. Their elimination was achieved by the transport of the disabled.
From January 1942 those deemed unproductive were taken to Hartheim castle near Linz in southern Austria. This majestic edifice built in the sixteenth century on the foundations of an older fortress was one of 6 euthanasia centres set up within the parameters of the plan Aktion T4; Its director was Rudolf Lonauer, an Austrian SS doctor. The detainees were taken by truck to gas chambers with a capacity for 50 persons and asphyxiated by carbon monoxide or Zyklon B. Their bodies were then incinerated in crematory furnaces. A convoy of 487 Polish priests, with some elderly, arrived October 1941. On May 3 1942, less than a week after the Holy Week tortures and 2 days after a visit to Dachau by Himmler, the first 50 priests were selected to transport for the disabled. (10)
From then until October 1942, great numbers of priests left in the transports of the disabled: From May 4 to August 12 1942, out of 724 detainees who were sent there, more than 300 were priests. A large percentage of them were more than fifty or even sixty years old. The four oldest Polish priests among those murdered in Hanheim during that period were born in 1867- considered as non-productive, these priests were singled out as targets since Himmler had asked in April for the work capacity of the priests to be exploited to the maximum: the priests called it “Ascension transport”. (11)
One advantage for the priests at Dachau was the chapel: Its construction was achieved as a result of negotiations by apostolic nuncio, Cesare Orsenigo and the German secretary of state for foreign affairs, Ernst von Weizsacker, undertaken in 1940. After difficult negotiations, the Vatican ambassador got his way. (12)
Mass, at 4am, (presumably resulting from the Vatican negotiations), was limited to priests only, for 30 minutes duration, with an SS guard at the front. They had a monstrance made by inmates from tin for the arrival of Bishop Gabriel Piguet who, on 25 September 1944, had been arrested for having support networks sheltering fugitive Jews. A Benedictine monk made a crosier that “showed good taste”. Other inmates cut crosses from copper and a pectoral cross was made from materials from the Messerschmitt factories where some of the Dachau commandos worked. (13)
The chapel was under SS surveillance but remained a place of great comfort. The observations of two lay prisoners express the importance of the Mass to them: Joseph Rovan, a convert, born into a German Jewish family that had arrived in Paris in 1934, went often to the chapel. He said:
“The priest was saying the same Latin words that all his confreres, at the same hour, were repeating in the morning Masses throughout the world. No longer could I recall the world of the concentration camp. Each one, for a precious moment, was restored to his original, fragile and indestructible dignity…On the way out, in the pale light of the early morning, one felt capable of facing a little better the hunger and the fear.”
Marcel Dejean records:
“We went to meet the One who held our lives in His hands; we rediscovered the idea of Love in the midst of suffering, hunger, egoism, hatred or indifference, and also a palpable sense of calm: the beauty of the altar, the ornaments, the rites, in the midst of our filth and poverty; tranquility, recollection and solitude in the midst of constant overcrowding and all sorts of noises…The SS were no longer anything but a sad nothingness beside the splendid, immortal reality of Christ.”(14)
Abbe Portier said:
“Of all unions there is none greater than that of the food that transforms itself into the substance of him who takes it; and when we receive Christ, we are truly changed into Him and become one with Him. Communion is the closest union that can possibly be conceived; it is the highest degree of union in this world.”(15)
Mass was celebrated in a tense atmosphere because of the hostility shown by the SS guards. Some hosts and wine were available by virtue of the Vatican negotiations but the majority of hosts and wine were smuggled into the camp by a young Polish woman called Madi; priests consecrated hosts and wine between bedsteads, (called “the catacombs of Schlafraum”), for fear of being spotted by an SS or kapo.
The Polish priests also said Mass at the plantation. Kneeling, the participants strove to make the SS believe they were tilling the soil. At each Mass they would reserve Hosts to take to their confreres who were suffering greatly, had been sent to the Revier, (Infirmary) or had been experimented upon. Kazimierz Majdanski could thus receive communion while critically ill, thanks to hosts brought in a small tin by Father Leopold Bilko, himself a guinea pig in experiments on phlegmon. During the typhus epidemic of 1944-1945, some priests went voluntarily to donate blood at the Revier in order to approach their sick confreres and give them surreptitious communion.
Like their predecessors in the catacombs, the priest used the acronym Ichthus – meaning “fish” in Greek- as a code name to refer to the consecrated hosts (each of the letters means: Iesous Christos Theou Huios Soter – that is, Jesus Christ Son of God, Saviour). On paper smuggled, the word fish or a drawing of a fish indicated that the smuggled host was secreted inside. (16)
A clandestine network arose to distribute communion around the camp. Some priests managed to get into the quarantine block to smuggle Hosts to ill inmates. Jacques Sommet benefitted from this immediate solidarity in the quarantine block: “In the pocket of my tunic I found a small packet. Someone had put it there. Who? I still do not know. In this tiny packet a little box, in this little box an ordinary piece of bread to eat and….a small piece of a host,” he relates. Once he was appointed to Block 26, Jacques Sommet tried to smuggle communion to the quarantine block but was caught. (17)
Priests smuggled hosts and, in some circumstances, said Mass, for the laymen, despite the risks. On Christmas Day 1944, Father Alexandre Morelli said Midnight Mass in the consultation room of the camp’s oculist, who was also a detainee:
“At Dachau I performed the most extraordinary priestly ministry of my life…One of my greatest blessings was to be able to celebrate a clandestine Mass for Christmas of ’44…In case of surprise everything was set up so that I could immediately make the glass and host disappear. And the Mass began. Footsteps of the SS were heard in the corridor. The steps came closer, passed, returned. It was very dangerous. Our hearts throbbed as though they would burst but we wanted to have our Midnight Mass.”
Extreme unction and confession were frequent at Dachau: The priests confessed to one another in all circumstances and could also hear the confessions of laymen while walking along the roads of the camp, although they had to be careful that they were not attempts to trap their confessors. (18)
The 2,579 Catholic clergymen, priests religious and seminarians were not all heroes and saints and their failings reflect their intrinsic humanity. There were stories of bursts of anger, authoritarian behaviour and a few rare cases of stealing bread, (the worst of crimes in the KZ and also one incident of tipping a piece of cake into the bin). These were observed – but the very rarity of these occasions testifies to the character of the priests who, living together in overcrowded filthy conditions, governed by fear and starvation, faced with abuse and violence on an arbitrary and daily basis, more often than not exhibited mental discipline and heroic, selfless regard for their fellow man. (19)
The famous American journalist Dorothy Thompson, who had interviewed Hitler in 1931, after conversations with survivors, observed:
“In the midst of the hell that was life in Dachau, so brutal, demeaning and deprived of humanity, who kept his own humanity and a sound mind the longest? Which persons, forgetting their own misery and their own humiliations, served the other men who were suffering in that diabolical system? There was only one answer, always the same: ‘The Catholic priests.’”(20)
Although they benefitted from the resources of their faith to overcome some aspects of their suffering, not all clergymen were visionaries or mystics. Like all their companions they dreaded hunger, cold, blows and the transport of the infirm; they experienced dejection loneliness fear, they trembled and wept. Edmond Michelet reports an incident where Bishop Piguet was caught by an SS guard having a discussion during roll call. ”The SS officer slapped the chatterbox, who was disconcerted and responded with a stream of nervous tears, which he quickly wiped away with the back of his sleeve. Upon returning to the block after the rank and file were dismissed, he came over to me and, grabbing my arm whispered in my ear ‘I was undignified just now, letting myself cry like a baby.’” (21)
Some emerged from the concentration camps broken by the experience; others were haunted to the end of their lives by the trauma - such as Father Robert Beauvais who by day was an energetic entertaining priest, enthusiastic about sailing, motoring and all modern technology; yet by night he used to walk the streets of Paris reciting the Rosary in order to escape his nightmares.
However, it is striking that, far from turning the majority of the priests, religious and seminarians against God, the horror of Dachau became, on the contrary, something that could be overcome, thanks to their faith in Him, even though questions of doubt inevitably arose. “Two millennia of Christian civilization …only to arrive at this. It makes you wonder whether the blood of God was shed in vain; whether the devil- ‘the prince of this world ‘ -is not in fact the great conqueror, whether sin may yet submerge humanity in an immense wave,’ Father Morelli speculated 2 years after his liberation; a little later he confided that he experienced in Dachau; ‘the finest hours of his apostolic life’.
Three interior resources emerge from various accounts of the survivors; a permanent disposition to pray, the capacity for self-abandonment, and the intention to make sacrifices. In the most difficult circumstances, prayer proves to be an indispensible support; Father Fraysse was confined for 3 ½ months in the ‘chicken cage’, a cell that was only a few centimetres wider than the average man’s shoulders and sometimes drove prisoners insane. He thinks that the only reason he was able to last was prayer. (22)
Although he was a guinea pig during the phlegmon experiments and endured atrocious sufferings, Kazimierz Majdanski remarks: ‘No despair because there was God. The demand for prayer, which was always felt, was stronger than the incisions.’
In the Polish priest barracks, several of them, especially the young ones, participated in a holy conspiracy that constituted in striving to practice the Christian virtues and to pray together to the Blessed Virgin every evening at 21:00.
Self-abandonment – not capitulation, but Christ’s attitude in the Gospel account as He accepted His passion – is the second pillar on which the priests relied. This dimension is found in the testimony of Father Sommet who says that death, even in Dachau, consisted of ‘leaving to God the accomplishment of what He has begun.” This approach to death, founded on faith, is a means to re-humanise it in the inhumane environment of the KZ. Accounts of the killing of Bishop Kozal, which are compared to the Stations of the Cross, reflect the self abandonment displayed by the Polish bishop who remained upright, charitable and recollected until his last moment.
The third character trait peculiar to the priests was the ability to give meaning to suffering by offering it up for their intentions. Father Josef Bechtel, who died on August 12 1942, ‘declared that in his worst suffering he entrusted himself to God which could only be good and that he offered his sufferings for his parishioners with complete interior joy.”
To the philosopher Hans Jonas - the God who allows men to do evil is also the God who supports and consoles. ’Since Dachau I strongly, even violently, believe in the grace and love of God. Obviously this faith presupposes a belief in eternal life, but there is no other satisfactory solution to the problem of evil and suffering,” Father Morelli related. Jacques Julliard, a contemporary essayist, echoes this sentiment: ”Misfortune is truly at the centre of Christianity, as the negative side of the commandment of love and as basic instruction in the way of the Cross and the beauty of the world.” Many priests in Dachau were firmly convinced that they were still being accompanied by God in the midst of their suffering.
“On November 10 1975, thirty years after the liberation of the camp, Kazimierz Majdanski appeared before the judges of the Munich Tribunal to testify in the trial of Dr Heinrich Schultz, one of the SS men chiefly responsible for the medical experiments conducted on human guinea pigs in the concentration camp. “The young seminarian from the Diocese of Wloclawek had become a bishop. Despite the sufferings caused by the rush of memories he agreed to relate what he underwent with his companions in the Biochemische Versuchsstation: the injection of purulent exudate, the unbearable pain and the stupefying fever, the groans of his confreres in agony, the barbaric incisions, the bedsores and the threat of septicemia, the after effects and the deaths. In his low-key testimony, Bishop Majdanski omitted not one single detail; he mentioned names, cited dates and places. The account distressed those present in the courtroom.
In the second part of his deposition the Bishop described the state of mind with which he was making the deposition. ‘I exclude all motives of hatred or vengeance,’ he explained. ‘I have forgiven them all and I expressed my forgiveness in the Last Will and Testament that I composed with a view to my death, which could occur at any moment.’ These words lend a new dimension to his trial which received only minimal coverage in the media and they struck the torturer full in the face. The former SS doctor, with downcast eyes, walked up to the man who was once his guinea pig and clasped his hand within his own for a long moment. 'All the same, we can look each other in the eye.’ Bishop Majdanski whispered to him.”
“The experience of the priests at Dachau led to the mystery of forgiveness. For Bishop Majdanski was not the only one to have forgiven his torturers. Without departing from the requirements of justice and memory, many priests refused to give in to the temptation of vengeance or hatred; and these emotions are absent from most of their testimonies. It is this aspect that is perhaps an illustration, at a very high degree, of heroism - the ability to forgive, which is one of the noblest fruits of their experience.” (23)
(1) Carroll-Abbing, ‘But for the Grace of God’, 1966, Secker and Warburg, at p. 47, quoting Dr Marcus Melchior the Chief Rabbi of Denmark.
(2) Guillaume Zeller, The Priest Barracks Dachau 1938-1945, Ignatius, 2006, at p. 130.
(3) ibid., at p. 133.
(4) ibid., at p. 145.
(5) In a book written by ex-Dachau inmates, Becher is said to have been selected from a group of ex-NSDAP, SS and SA members who were imprisoned as a result of internecine rivalries. All of them were posted as kapos at Dachau; forum.axishistory.
(6) ibid., at p. 147, from testimony of Bishop Majdanski, “Miracule de Dachau”.
(7) ibid., at p. 148; This incident was mentioned by Pius XII on 2 June 1945 in an address to the cardinals when he paid homage to the priest.
(7A) ibid., at p. 140.
(9) ibid., at p. 113: Edmond Michelet ‘Rue de la Liberte Dacahu 1943-1945’, Livre de Vie series 2nd ed., (Paris: Seuil 1998) 221-24.
(10) ibid., at p. 161.
(11) ibid., at p. 164.
(12) ibid., at p. 182.
(13) ibid., at p. 176.
(14) ibid., at pp. 140, 180; Rovan, ‘Contes de Dachau’.
(15) ibid., at p. 182; Pain de Vie (Brussels: Editions Saint Bernard 1989) 56-57.
(16) ibid., at p. 187.
(17) ibid., at p. 188.
(18) ibid., at p. 193.
(19) ibid., at p. 233.
(20) ibid., at p. 235.
(21) ibid., at p. 241.
(22) ibid., at p. 236-7.
(23) ibid., at p. 247.
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