Description
At the Nazi concentration camp Dachau, three barracks out of thirty were occupied by clergy from 1938 to 1945. The vast majority of the 2,720 men imprisoned in these barracks were Catholics 2,579 priests, monks, and seminarians from in every single place Europe. More than a 3rd of the prisoners within the “priest block” died there.
The story of those men, which has been submerged within the overall history of the concentration camps, is told on this riveting historical account. Both tragedies and sumptuous gestures are chronicled here–from the terrifying forced march in 1942 to the heroic voluntary confinement of the ones dying of typhoid to the moving clandestine ordination of a tender German deacon by a French bishop. But even so recounting moving episodes, the book sheds new light on Hitler’s system of concentration camps and the intrinsic anti-Christian animus of Nazism.