Divine Mercy: God’s Great Expression of His Love
Dachau
Photo by Darshan Gajara on Unsplash
Even amongst the barbarity of the Nazi killing machine of World War Two, Auschwitz stands out for the monstrosity of evil committed therein. In my previous article, I wrote about the 80th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz. I have not been to Auschwitz but in 2001, I visited another infamous concentration camp: Dachau.
Nazi Germany constructed and operated a vast network of concentration camps across Germany and the counties that it forcibly seized during the Second World War. These camps included forced labor camps and extermination camps. The Auschwitz Camp Complex in Poland included an extermination camp where over 1 million persons, mostly Jews, were murdered.
Dachau was the first concentration camp. Located outside Munich in Bavaria, Dachau was established in March 1933. Dachau was primarily used to imprison political prisoners, Jews, and Catholic and Protestant clergy. One barracks was specifically used to house priests, pastors and ministers. Dachau did have a gas chamber but this was not used. However, its crematorium was used. Though Dachau was not a death camp like Auschwitz, thousands of Dachau prisoners were murdered there or after being sent to other locations to be killed. In addition, thousands more died due to disease, forced labor, starvation, malnutrition, mistreatment or as the result of inhumane medical experiments. An estimated 40,000 persons died at Dachau. On 29 April 1945, the units of U.S. Army’s 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions and 20th Armored Division liberated Dachau and freed the approximately 30,000 prisoners still being held there. Tragically, several thousand of these malnourished, sick and emaciated prisoners died within a few days or weeks of their liberation.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the National World War Two Museum have more about Dachau on their websites
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/dachau
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/last-days-dachau-concentration-camp
Amongst the several hundred thousand persons held at Dachau during its 12 years of cruelty were Catholic priests and members of religious orders and Protestant ministers. One of the barracks buildings was specially reserved for them. Some 2,720 clergymen were imprisoned at Dachau altogether; nearly 95% were Catholic. By far, Polish priests were the largest national group at Dachau with German, French, Czech, Austrian and other countries also represented. 1,034 members of the clergy died in Dachau.
Miraculously, intense pressure from the Vatican and the German bishops resulted in a chapel being built in Dachau, though only for the use of the priests. Lay prisoners were not permitted to use the chapel.
Among those held in Dachau was Auxiliary Bishop Michal Kozal of the Diocese of Wloclawek, Poland. Arrested by the Gestapo in November 1939 along with a number of priests and seminarians of his diocese, Bishop Kozal was transferred to Dachau in May 1941. An inspiration to his fellow prisoners, Bishop Kozal contracted typhus in early 1943 and was murdered by lethal injection on 26 January 1943. He was beatified by Pope St. John Paul II on 14 June 1987.
Father John M. Lenz was an Austrian priest who preached in opposition to Nazism. For this, he was arrested by the Gestapo in December 1938. Ultimately, he ended up in Dachau where he endured many long years of abuse and persecution. He survived to be liberated by the U.S. Army in April 1945 and later wrote a book about his experiences Christ in Dachau
“The prisoners of Dachau had lost everything; those who accepted this sacrifice as the will of God learned to know an inner peace and joy which no amount of cruelty, starvation and disease could banish, and enjoyed a freedom that took no account of barbed wire,” Father John wrote in Christ in Dachau (285).
Another prominent religious leader held at Dachau was Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemöller. A decorated U-Boat commander in World War One, Niemöller embarked on a religious vocation after the war and became a Lutheran minister. A vocal critic of the Nazis, Niemöller was arrested in 1937 and imprisoned in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. Later he was transferred to Dachau. In the closing weeks of the war, he was taken by the SS with a group of prominent prisoners to Austria and was liberated by the U.S. Army.
In March 2001, I visited Dachau with my brother Mike and cousins Scott and Steve. I have visited and prayed in some of the holiest places in Christendom, including the Grotto at Lourdes, St. Peter’s Basilica, and the Miraculous Medal Chapel in Paris. Though God is present everywhere, He is very powerfully present in these and many other holy places. It is as if the veil between this world and the next is thinner here than in other places.
But at Dachau, even fifty-six years after its liberation, I felt a quite different presence. Even fifty-six years later, I felt the lingering presence of the evils committed here. A Catholic church feels holy; Dachau feels evil.
Immediately adjacent to the Dachau Camp is the Carmelite Convent of the Precious Blood. It was founded in 1964 by Sister Maria Theresia and consecrated by Auxiliary Bishop Johannes Neuhäusler who had been imprisoned at Dachau. The Carmelite Convent was intended as a place of hope, prayer and peace. In this holy place, I found the hope, prayer and peace that the Nazis so fervently tried to destroy at Dachau and in the world in general.
The experience of visiting Dachau is very difficult to put in words, especially when one is familiar with the Holocaust (Shoah) in general and the atrocities committed at Dachau in particular.
Yet as I wrote in my previous article about Auschwitz, God called people to great charity and holiness…even in the midst of such monstrous evil as that committed at Dachau.
In the opening of his Gospel, St. John tells us:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.
All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be.
What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race; the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1:1-5)
The light of Christ shined in the great darkness of Dachau and Auschwitz and the darkness could not overcome it. That light shined through courageous people like Blessed Michal Kozal and Father John Lenz. Dachau and Auschwitz are memories, albeit painful ones, but Christ is Eternal!
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About the Author
Bryan J. Dickerson is an author and historian specializing in military and naval history, and Catholicism. He earned his BA in History from Rowan University (NJ), MA in American History from Monmouth University (NJ) and a graduate Certificate in Archival Studies from Louisiana State University. His writings have appeared online and in print in such publications as Columbia (the magazine of the Knights of Columbus) and Celebrate Life (the magazine of the American Life League). He is a 4th Degree member of the Knights of Columbus and a Past Grand Knight of a council in New Jersey. His book The Liberators of Pilsen: the U.S. 16th Armored Division in World War II Czechoslovakia was published by McFarland Books in 2018 and his book Dive Bomber Down: James A. Nist Naval Aviator in the Pacific War is now available from McFarland Books. He has also self-published sixeen books, including In the Name of COVID: The Assault on Religious Freedom in 2020. A former U.S. Navy Reserve Religious Program Specialist 1st Class (Fleet Marine Force), he mobilized and deployed in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom twice. He and his wife Lisa have four children and live in southern New Jersey.
