Never in the course of history have so many priests, monks and seminarians been murdered in such a small area: 1,034 lost their lives.
The Priest Barracks: Dachau 1938-1945 Did the Nazi persecution against the clergy have ideological or political underpinnings? From all countries and of all ages, the priests were gathered behind the barbed wire of Dachau according to an agreement wrested from the Reich by Vatican diplomacy. This book deals with many questions about the priest barracks, including: How does the experience of the priests at Dachau compare to those who were laymen? For eight years, both tragedies and magnificent gestures punctuated the journey of the clergy at Dachau, from the terrifying forced march of "Holy Week" in 1942 to the heroic voluntary confinement of priests in the barracks of those dying of typhoid, to the moving clandestine ordination of a young German deacon by a French bishop. How many people know that at the Nazi death camp Dachau, three barracks out of thirty were permanently occupied by clergy from 1938 to 1945? Were their moral convictions, forged by the Gospel and the tradition of the Church, able to resist the perversion of values imposed by the SS? Beyond the personal journeys of which it is composed, the history of the priests at Dachau sheds new light on Hitler's system of concentration camps, on the intrinsic anti-Christian animus of Nazism and, beyond the strictly historical perspective, on faith and spiritual commitment.