Dachau: ‘The Largest Cemetery of Catholic Priests in the World’

Catholic Culture ^ | 2/3/15

[dfwgator]

“First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.”

[Faith Presses On]

But it wasn’t 2,500 Catholic priests. 2,500 priests, seminarians and religious, compared to Protestant and Orthodox clergymen. That’s not apples to apples. And unless you’d look carefully of the histories of the non-Jewish people put in Dachau, it’s hard to tell how many were imprisoned out of Christian conviction. People like the ten Booms might now show up unless their lives are studied.

[Faith Presses On]

So someone isn’t a servant of God if they suffer for His sake, and in so doing bring glory to His name, and point people to Christ? I have no doubt that He has a different view of that, considering there’s examples of it over and over in the Bible.

[Alex Murphy]

But it wasn’t 2,500 Catholic priests. 2,500 priests, seminarians and religious, compared to Protestant and Orthodox clergymen. That’s not apples to apples. And unless you’d look carefully of the histories of the non-Jewish people put in Dachau, it’s hard to tell how many were imprisoned out of Christian conviction. People like the ten Booms might not show up unless their lives are studied.

Thank you for posting that. That was the point behind posting Betsie ten Boom's picture.

[NKP_Vet]

http://www.auschwitz.dk/Kolbe.htm

[NKP_Vet]

3 million catholic Poles were murdered in the death camps. Their big prize was to get as many Priests as they could.

Its just as disgusting to ignore this as it is to ignore the Jews who were slaughtered.

[GeronL]

but there are many people invested in the idea that NAZI’s were Christians somehow. We aren’t supposed to talk about the Christians and Jehovah’s Witnesses and others who were put to death.

[Alex Murphy]

....there are many people invested in the idea that NAZI’s were Christians somehow.

I've had more than a couple of FRoman Catholics who have claimed that the Nazi Party was a Protestant movement, and was overwhelmingly supported by German Protestants. Their spurious claims are all based on the fallacy that people who aren't Catholic are automatically Protestant.

[GeronL]

That sounds like something Catholic freepers would write, all the evils on Earth are because of protestants to them.

[NorthMountain]

but there are many people invested in the idea that NAZI’s were Christians somehow.

Many of these people seem to be atheistic communists. Communists and National Socialists seem to hate each other, probably because bloody-handed tyrants don't like competition. So the commies saw an opportunity to tar two of their enemies with each other ... Most of the "Nazis are Christian" propaganda can be traced to the USSR and the DDR.

[marshmallow]

But it wasn’t 2,500 Catholic priests. 2,500 priests, seminarians and religious, compared to Protestant and Orthodox clergymen. That’s not apples to apples.

You're right. Orthodox and Protestant clergymen have been combined. If you want to be completely rigorous and compare "apples to apples", separate Orthodox and Protestant and compare Catholic priests, to Protestant clergymen to Orthodox priests.

If only half of the 2,500 Catholic number was attributable to priests and the remainder was composed of religious and seminarians, there would still be a huge disparity between Catholic priests and either Protestant clergy and Orthodox priests. Likely more than 10-fold.

And unless you’d look carefully of the histories of the non-Jewish people put in Dachau, it’s hard to tell how many were imprisoned out of Christian conviction. People like the ten Booms might now show up unless their lives are studied.

A point which the article is not disputing since it quotes statistics for clergy and religious only. The same could be said of Catholic laymen and women.

[annieokie]

Thank you for providing their names, it is very important that we remember them. I just learned that some of my mothers namesake were in the camps, her ggrandparents came to America long before the war, but I am sure there were relatives left behind.

Gamecock:I will now go back and read the story as you suggested by clicking on the picture. I try to read as much as possible any book or article that will tell me of first hand experiences of survival in the camps. Never forget

[Gamecock]

My pleasure.

My dad was one of the Soldiers who liberated Dachau. Haunted him for the rest of his life.

We (Mrs. Gamecock and I and the little chicks) went a few years back. Seemed when we passed through the gate the temperature dropped 10 degrees from an already chilly German autumn day.

[annieokie]

I imagine you have so many things that you can share and so little room here to do so. Important that you begin a journal for you children and theirs about what your dad has told you.

My daughter went to Germany with a friend who left Germany at the end of the war. While there my daughter wanted to visit one of the camps, her friend scoffed and asked "why do Americans still want to see those camps". I can only suspect this remark was out of quilt. My daughter now regrets not going anyway.

Those Germans who came out are still very protective of what happened, and one I said how ugly Hitler was, told me "Oh no, he was very handsome". OMG......unbelievable. They knew what was happening.jmo

[caww]

The Vatican not only participated in mass murder during WW11... but welcomed Antisemitism with open arms and wallets!

.... "This incredible state of affairs was even more starkly etched in Croatia, where 'many Priests themselves committed mass murder',...... including as commanders of approximately half of the twenty death camps set up by the Nazi-like Ustasha regime:

'Dozens, perhaps even hundreds of priests and monks shed their priestly apparel and 'donned Ustasha uniforms', in order to share in the `sacred work' of murder, rape and robbery.'........ The most notorious camp was Jasenovac, where the Croats killed 200,000 Jews, Serbs, and Gypsies.

Forty thousand of them perished under the unusually cruel reign of 'Brother Satan,' the "Franciscan friar Miroslav Filipovic-Majstorovic."

Pius XII neither reproached nor punished him or the other Croatian priest-executioners during or after the war. ....Instead, Pius XII supported their country's mass-murdering regime....."{Daniel Goldhagen, A Moral Reckoning, p. 49 – 54 }

.... Although a puppet of Hitler, 'Ante Pavelic', the dictator of Catholic Croatia, once chided Hitler on a visit to Berlin about his `lenient' treatment of German Jews, .."boasting that in comparison he had completely solved the Jewish question in Croatia",...... while some Jews remained alive in Hitler's Third Reich....." I'm disgusted with the Catholic Church and I hope that we can teach our children a honest version of the holocaust.... Unfortunately my generation wasn't taught in history class how the Catholic Church participated in mass murder."

on May 25, 1941, in an article in a Catholic Action publication entitled ....."Why are the Jews Being Persecuted",........."Priest Franjo Kralik"... justifies the persecution on religious grounds:

"The descendants of those who hated Jesus, who condemned him to death, who crucified him and immediately persecuted his pupils, are guilty of greater excesses that those of their forefathers .... Satan helped them invent Socialism and Communism .... The movement for freeing the world from the Jews is a movement for the renaissance of human dignity. The Almighty and All-wise God is behind this movement."

Ante Pavelic, Croatian facist leader. Forced Jews into Nazi-style concentration camps and commited genocide against his enemies. He was given support by Pope Pius XII.

Pavelic and the Catholic Archbishop of Zagreb, Aloysius Stepinac

[caww]

Croatian Archbishop Stepanic maybe 'Blessed' in the Vatican fantasy world, but in the real world he's a war criminal.

This is the same man under whose Catholic rule, Croatia experienced a full bore Roman Catholic led genocide. The numbers of murdered at the hands of Catholic clergy alone are staggering........This is the same man under whose Catholic rule, Croatia experienced a full bore Roman Catholic led genocide...... The numbers of murdered at the hands of Catholic clergy alone are staggering.....Stepanic was 'the Ustache's great enabler along with the Vatican',..... and one of Dictator Ante Pavelic's biggest supporters and benefactors.

I would strongly encourage those young people to read Stepanic's true story, not the revisionist history the pope used to mask the Vatican's direct participation in the Ustache genocide.

From historian Avro Manhattan's book... "The Vatican Holocaust." .... It will give an idea of what things were really like during the Archbishop Stepanic backed Ustache regime.

"It is an historical fact. Rabid nationalism and religious dogmatism were its two main ingredients. During the existence of Croatia as an independent Catholic State, over 700,000 men, women and children perished. Many were executed, tortured, died of starvation, buried alive, or were burned to death. Hundreds were forced to become Catholic. Catholic padres ran concentration camps; Catholic priests were officers of the military corps which committed such atrocities.... 700,000 in a total population of a few million, proportionally, would be as if one-third of the USA population had been exterminated by a Catholic militia."

Two investigators to the Ustasha arrival into Zagreb in April 1941 wrote that Archbishop Stepinac immediately ....“offered his congratulations to Pavelic” and held a banquet to celebrate the founding of the new Nazi puppet state.

He also ordered the proclamation of the independent state to be delivered from all pulpits of the Catholic Church in Croatia on Easter Sunday and arranged Pavelic’s audience with Pope Pius XII.

Stepinac issued a Pastoral Letter ordering the Croatian clergy to support the new Ustasha state:......God, who directs the destiny of nations and controls the hearts of Kings, has given us Ante Pavelic and moved the leader of a friendly and allied people, Adolf Hitler, to use his victorious troops to disperse our oppressors…Glory be to God, our gratitude to Adolf Hitler and loyalty to our Poglavnik, Ante Pavelic"......

[Campion]

I've had more than a couple of FRoman Catholics who have claimed that the Nazi Party was a Protestant movement, and was overwhelmingly supported by German Protestants.

The Nazi Party was overwhelming *not* supported by German Catholics, contrary to what a certain former member of your "Calvinist Caucus" used to post ... along with the whole threads she posted talking up the support a certain British hack writer gave to what has been conclusively established as a KGB plot to discredit Pius XII.

[caww]

Pope Pius XII had been happy enough to meet Ante Pavelić in 1941, after his murder spree. ......It was this meeting that caused.... a British official in the Foreign Office to describe the pope as ....“the greatest moral coward of our age”.

Archbishop Stepinac with the Ustashi, the organisation that out-nazi'd the Nazi's