The Introduction to Fr. Jean Bernard's "Priestblock 25487: A Memoir of Dachau" | Robert Royal | Ignatius Insight
The Introduction to Fr. Jean Bernard's Priestblock 25487: A Memoir of
Dachau | Robert Royal | Ignatius Insight
http://ignatiusinsight.com/features2010/rroyal_intropriestblock_aug2010.asp
This
story is both ordinary and extraordinary. It is ordinary because Catholic
priests and religious were regularly rounded up and sent to concentration camps
in large numbers during the nightmare of Nazism in Europe. It is extraordinary,
as all such accounts are, because they give us vivid and unforgettable
indications of both the depths of depravity and heights of sanctity to which
the human race is capable. Father Jean Bernard offers a straightforward picture
of how Good and Evil played out around him in his imprisonment in the Nazi
concentration camp at Dachau. He takes great pains to be accurate about the
ever shifting conditions as he witnessed them personally. His strict regard for
truth, even in such circumstances, is itself an implicit rejection of the
violence built on lies that the Third Reich inflicted everywhere it could. If
there is any truth missing in this moving story, it is Father Bernard's own
quiet heroism and holiness, which he is too humble to include, but which we may
intuit in his primary emphasis on the plight of his fellow inmates.
People who have not looked carefully at the position of the Catholic
Church under the Third Reich may be particularly surprised by this story. The
Nazis did not want to exterminate all Catholics, but they most certainly
did want to exterminate all Jews, and they nearly succeeded. So the Shoah cannot and should not be described as if the Nazis
did as much harm to Catholics as they did to Jews. Yet it is a fact of history
that millions of Catholics were murdered in the Nazi camps, and that is
something we must never forget.
During and right after World War II, it was commonly assumed that
Christians as well as Jews suffered a great deal under Hitler. Jews were
grateful to Catholics and others for such assistance as they were able to
provide, and especially esteemed Pope Pius XII, who quite probably saved more
Jews from the Nazis than any other single person. That was why Golda Meir, one
of the founders and later Prime Minister of the newly created Jewish state
of Israel, thanked the pope and honored him among the righteous gentiles:
"When fearful martyrdom came to our people in the decade of Nazi terror, the
voice of the pope was raised for the victims." Similarly, Moshe Sharett, the
second Prime Minister of Israel, remarked after meeting with Pius: "I told him
[the Pope] that my first duty was to thank him, and through him the Catholic
Church, on behalf of the Jewish public for all they had done in the various
countries to rescue Jews. We are deeply grateful to the Catholic Church."
But beginning in the 1960s, following a play entitled The Deputy by the Communist-inspired revisionist, Rolf
Hochuth, there has been a massive attempt to deny these facts and paint the
Church as all but a Nazi accomplice and Pius as "Hitler's pope."
One of the advantages of a memoir like this is its concrete evidence that
the anti-Catholic smears are false. Pius was aware not only of the threats to
Jews but the widespread persecution of his own priests by the Nazis.
Careful study of the records in recent years has even given us some concrete
numbers that were not available to the pope at the time. In 1932, for instance,
just before the Nazis came to power, there were about twenty-one thousand
priests in Germany. By the time Nazism was defeated a decade later, more
than eight thousand of these men had either been threatened, beaten,
imprisoned, or killed by the regime. In other words, well over one-third of
Germany's priests came into open conflict with the Third Reich. We can be
morally certain that the number who, seeing the treatment of their fellows,
opposed Nazism in more subtle or quiet ways was even higher.
Father Bernard was not a German. He came from Luxembourg and joined the
2,670 priests who have been documented to have passed through Dachau, some 600
to their death, from Albania, Belgium, Croatia, Czechoslovakia, Denmark,
England, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Italy, Norway, Poland, Serbia,
Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, Yugoslavia, and other nations. Priests were sent
to every camp that Nazis had created, either because they had expressed dislike
for Nazism or because Nazism disliked them. (Bogus charges of financial misdealing
or sexual impropriety were often trumped up, but many priests, like Father
Bernard, never knew what, exactly, they had been arrested for.) For some
reason, however, the Gestapo particularly favored Dachau as a destination for
priests and Protestant clergy, perhaps as a way of keeping them together and
thereby preventing them from "infecting" other prison populations with
Christianity.
Because in the end the Nazi hatred of the Church and of what they called
"negative" Christianity is a spiritual orientation. Both Hitler and Mussolini
shared that spirit, but the Italian convinced the German that a direct attack
on the Church had historically always led to failure. The case called for
delicacy, tact, indirect and subtle means that would not make anyone a
conspicuous Christian martyr, but would eventually result in, as Hitler put it,
the chance to "crush the Church like a toad." Anyone who looks over these pages
will not encounter Nazi subtlety. Camp administrators preferred the most
outrageous brutality. Clever attempts at manipulating public opinion, in
Germany and around the world, took place at a much more public level. But what
we see here is the brutal and sadistic reality behind the misinformation and
propaganda.
We lost a lot of what we knew about this history in the last quarter of
the twentieth century. In the 1970s Jewish historians were quite energetic and
successful in reminding the world about the Shoah, the attempted genocide of Europe's Jews during World War II. For
reasons that are not entirely clear, Catholics and other Christians virtually
forgot their own heroic witnesses and even had a hard time in keeping before
the eyes of world opinion ongoing persecutions and martyrdoms of Christians by
the thousands in places like China, Cuba, Vietnam, and the Soviet Bloc. That
was why Pope John Paul II made it a part of the program for the Third
Millennium, which was celebrated in 2000 in Rome and around the world, to
remember the modern Christian martyrs (Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant). As
he writes in Tertio Millennio Adveniente, "their witness must not be forgotten."
His words continue to hold a lesson for us today. This little book works
against one temptation that those of us who have never had a similar experience
may never have felt, but which we may become complicit in by a failure of
truthfulness on the order of the author's. Anyone who suffers a trauma of this
magnitude or who has come upon such horrors will be tempted to turn away. But
to do so always has repercussions, not only for our understanding of the past,
but for our very lives in the present and the future. As Father Bernard writes,
"Wanting to forget would also be a weakness on the part of those who suffered...
it would be turning a blind eye to similar events taking place today, in full
view, in many other parts of the world... Forgetting would be cowardice on the
part of the people against whom all these crimes were committed."
The anti-Christian currents in Nazism and Fascism and Communism did not
entirely disappear from our world with the fall of the regimes associated with
those ideologies in the twentieth century. They are still among us today in
disguised cultural forms that demand our constant vigilance.
This republication of Priestblock 25487 is a valuable reminder of the price of failing to be vigilant both for
the Church and for the world, because the persecution of Catholics in the
twentieth century is not merely a part of religious history. It is an
important but widely neglected part of the secular record of our time as well.
Praise for Priestblock 25487: A Memoir of Dachau:
"Stunning... Casts light into dark and previously
neglected corners of the horror that was the Third Reich." -- Richard John
Neuhaus, Editor in Chief First Things
"Father Jean Bernard's portrait of survival in a German
concentration camp is simple, forceful and vivid – and therefore
impossible to put down or forget. It ranks with the great 20th Century personal
testimonies against totalitarian violence. Imprisoned and persecuted as a
priest, Bernard clung stubbornly to his faith in Jesus Christ, his own humanity
and his ability to forgive. Priestblock 25487 is a diary of Catholic discipleship under extreme conditions that will
deeply move all persons of conscience." -- Charles J. Chaput, Archbishop
of Denver
"Gripping! This crisp story of the 3,000-plus Christian
clergy at Dachau in 1941 forces me to turn pages quickly, in horror. During
Holy Week some fifty priests have their palms tied together behind them, then
bent inwards toward the spine, before being lifted on hooks strung up to the
rafters, where they hang for hours in excruciating pain. Humiliation, beatings,
and contempt are heaped upon them day after endless day. Large numbers sicken
and die. In its understated power, this brief book is unforgettable." -- Michael
Novak, author Washington's God (with
Jana Novak)
"Deeply moving... The simple honesty of this account of
one of the most vivid battles between good and evil in human history is as
exhausting as it is inspiring. Evil is only a problem for those who believe in
good. The suffering of these priests for the sake of the loving God is one of
the modern age's glorious mysteries." -- Father George W. Rutler
"I loved the book and could not put it down. It is
dramatic. It is brutally honest. It is a great testimony to so many Catholics
and other Christians who suffered at the hands of the Nazis. And finally the
book is so important as a witness to what really happened to so many faithful
during WW II versus what the anti-Catholic secular media want us to
believe." -- Teresa Tomeo, Ave Maria Radio
"Priestblock tells
the largely unknown story of priestly resistance to the brutality of German
National Socialism... A good book for those who think everything has been said
about the mysterium iniquitatis, the mystery of evil, in its Nazi form." -- George Weigel
Related Ignatius Insight Excerpts and Essays:
• Auschwitz and Catholic Jews | Dr. Ralph McInerny
• The Cross and The Holocaust | Regis Martin
• Chapter 1 of Priestblock 25487: A Memoir of Dachau | Fr. Jean Bernard
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