At the Nazi concentration camp Dachau, three barracks out of thirty were occupied by clergy from 1938 to 1945. The overwhelming majority of the 2,720 men imprisoned in these barracks were Catholics—2,579 priests, monks, and seminarians from all over Europe. More than a third of the prisoners in the "priest block" died there. The story of these men, which has been submerged in the overall history of the concentration camps, is told in this riveting historical account. Both tragedies and magnificent gestures are chronicled here--from the terrifying forced march in 1942 to the heroic voluntary confinement of those dying of typhoid to the moving clandestine ordination of a young German deacon by a French bishop. Besides recounting moving episodes, the book sheds new light on Hitler's system of concentration camps and the intrinsic anti-Christian animus of Nazism.

At the Nazi concentration camp Dachau, three barracks out of thirty were occupied by clergy from 1938 to 1945. The overwhelming majority of the 2,720 men imprisoned in these barracks were Catholics—2,579 priests, monks, and seminarians from all over Europe. More than a third of the prisoners in the "priest block" died there. The story of these men, which has been submerged in the overall history of the concentration camps, is told in this riveting historical account. Both tragedies and magnificent gestures are chronicled here--from the terrifying forced march in 1942 to the heroic voluntary confinement of those dying of typhoid to the moving clandestine ordination of a young German deacon by a French bishop. Besides recounting moving episodes, the book sheds new light on Hitler's system of concentration camps and the intrinsic anti-Christian animus of Nazism.

Catholic priests all across Poland were arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps at the beginning of World War II. This memoir by Fr. Henryk Maria Malak (1912-1987) is their story and his. Through the author's eyes we witness the German invasion, atrocities against the local population, and the roundup of priests from the region. A series of "transports" takes them to Stutthof and Grenzdorf in Poland, then to Sachsenhausen and Dachau in Germany. Fr. Malak spent more than four years at Dachau, and he describes camp life in detail. (His final chapters are entries from a diary he kept secretly near the end of the war.) Some priests are selected for medical experiments; others are sent on "death transports." Throughout their ordeal they face brutal treatment, hard labor, hunger, disease. Although many perish along the way, all remain steadfast in their faith and in their loyalty to Poland.

Accompanying CD-ROM contains ... "all of the texts and documents in the exhibition."--Page 5.

Christian Reger's quiet storybook world began to collapse in the frenzy of 1939 prewar Germany. A minister of the Confessing Church, he and other clergy critical of Adolf Hitler and Nazism ended up in the Dachau concentration camp, where 10 percent of the prisoners were men of the cloth. There Reger and the other prisoners of Barracks No. 26--nicknamed the Pastors' Barracks--came face to face with man's inhumanity to man.