Catholic priests in the Dachau camp

Dachau became the camp where most of the religious dissidents were sent, including 2,579 Catholic Priests. The priests at Dachau were separated from the other prisoners and housed together in several barrack buildings in the rear of the camp.

Nerin E. Gun, a Turkish journalist who was a prisoner at Dachau, wrote in his book entitled "The Day of the Americans," published in 1966, that there were 1,240 men of the cloth at Dachau at the time of liberation and 95% of them were Catholic. Gun pointed out that, by 1965, almost every book ever written about Dachau was written by a Catholic priest. According to Gun, the priests lived comfortably in their block and refused to let any other prisoners take refuge there. They did not work; they were not mistreated, and therefore they were able at their leisure to observe everything that went on about them and write fine books.

Gun wrote in his book "The Day of the Americans" that Cardinal Faulhaber in Munich sent food packages to Dr. Johann Neuhäusler right up to the time that the prisoners in the "Honor Bunker" were sent to the Tyrol for their own protection before the camp was liberated. Gun pointed out in his book that Hitler was Catholic and that "he paid his religious dues to the German Catholic Church until the day he died." Hitler was never excommunicated by the Pope, according to Gun, and he never apostasized.

Paul Berben wrote the following about how the priests were treated differently than the other prisoners:

On 15th March 1941 the clergy were withdrawn from work Kommandos on orders from Berlin, and their conditions improved. They were supplied with bedding of the kind issued to the S.S., and Russian and Polish prisoners were assigned to look after their quarters. They could get up an hour later than the other prisoners and rest on their beds for two hours in the morning and afternoon. Free from work, they could give themselves to study and to meditation. They were given newspapers and allowed to use the library. Their food was adequate; they sometimes received up to a third of a loaf of bread a day; there was even a period when they were given half a litre of cocoa in the morning and a third of a bottle of wine daily.

Because of the fact that they were exempt from work, the priests were chosen as subjects for medical experiments, conducted by Dr. Klaus Schilling, on a cure for malaria. As a result of these experiments, many of the priests died. The priests were also put to work in May 1942 in the construction of Baracke X, the crematory building where both the homicidal gas chamber and the disinfection chambers are located. According to Berben, the priests volunteered to help as nurses during the typhus epidemic in the camp in 1943 and as a result many of them contracted the disease and died.

In the photograph below, a Catholic priest, Father Theodore Korcz, reads from a record book kept by Dr. Klaus Schilling about the malaria experiments which he conducted on the priests at Dachau while Lt. Col. William Denson, the American prosecutor, looks on.

According to Paul Berben's book, the Catholic priests at Dachau persuaded the Nazi camp officials to build a chapel for religious services, instead of using one of the barracks for this purpose. Berben wrote: "The patient work by clergy and lay people alike had in the end achieved a miracle. The chapel was 20 metres long by 9 wide and could hold about 800 people, but often more than a thousand crowded in." According to Bergen, religious services were held throughout the day on Sundays, with one service immediately following another.

In his book "The Day the Thunderbird Cried," David L. Israel gives a completely different picture of how the priests were treated at Dachau. Israel was a soldier in the U.S. Army, His job was to interview the Dachau prisoners after they were liberated in order to gather evidence for the war crimes trials which had already been planned.

The following quote is from "The Day the Thunderbird Cried," published in 2005:

New and special tortures were devised daily for the Catholic priests. Sometimes, if they were lucky, they would be assigned to clean the dog kennels or the horse stables. On those occasions, they could sometimes get some of the leftover food which meant another day of survival. Being assigned to the pigsty was almost sure death; many of the prisoners never returned. Their bodies remained where they had been drowned in the pig swill as the SS guards looked on.

In the last days of the war, as prisoners from the camps near the war zone in the east were evacuated towards the west, Dachau became increasingly overcrowded. The Commandant of the camp wanted to eliminate the chapel and use the building for housing to alleviate the overcrowded conditions which were leading to epidemics. But the clergy refused to give up their chapel, according to Berben, and suggested that instead of the chapel, the brothel or the shoe repair shop should be used for housing. The clergy won and "the chapel was retained to the last" according to Berben's book.

Jews at Dachau

Dachau Life

Commandants at Dachau

Prisoner classification

Prisoner Badges

Labor Allocation at Dachau

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This page was last updated on July 2, 2008