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Karl Leisner (28 February 1915 in Rees – 12 August 1945 in Planegg, Germany) was a Roman Catholic priest interned in the Dachau concentration camp. He died of tuberculosis shortly after being liberated by the Allied forces. He has been declared a martyr and was beatified by Pope John Paul II on 23 June 1996.
Leisner was born on 28 February 1915, the oldest of five children. When he was six years old, the family moved to Kleve, a city on the lower Rhine, where his father worked as a civil servant. He attended school and completed his gymnasium studies in 1934. During his youth, he became an altar boy and, at the suggestion of the high school chaplain, formed a Catholic youth group, the Saint Werner Group. These youth groups combined prayer with outdoor activities, such as camping and cycling. Leisner turned out to be a natural leader and became a youth leader in the 1930s, during the era in which the Nazis were beginning to take control of all youth organizations. In order to avoid Nazi interference, Leisner would often take his group on camping trips to Holland or Belgium. [1]
In 1934, when he was nineteen, Leisner entered the seminary in Munich, [2] and was named Diocesan Youth Leader by Clemens August von Galen, Bishop of Münster. He spent six months in compulsory agricultural work during which, despite Nazi opposition, he organized Sunday Mass for his fellow workers. His home was raided by the Gestapo, who seized his diaries and papers. These meticulously preserved documents tell how the spiritual young man became a religious leader.
On 25 March 1939, Galen ordained Leisner a deacon. [2] Shortly after his ordination, during a medical examination, the doctor told the new deacon that he had contracted tuberculosis. In those days, the sole treatment available for the disease was good food and fresh air. These were to be found at a sanitorium in St. Blasien, in the Black Forest, where he was sent and began to recover. It was during his recovery that a fellow patient heard him criticize Adolf Hitler. The Gestapo arrested him as a political prisoner on 9 November 1939, when he was twenty-five. He was interned first in Freiburg and later in Mannheim. [3] Leisner was initially imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, but was moved to the Dachau concentration camp on 14 December 1940, where he became prisoner No. 22,356. Since he was a deacon, Leisner was assigned to the priests' block. [1]
Prisoners often had to work outside in snow or rain and then had to sleep in their wet prison clothes. Cold weather, poor rations and harsh treatment proved a dangerous combination for someone already suffering to tuberculosis. Such conditions caused Leisner's condition to become active. Then, during an inspection, two Gestapo guards beat him unconscious and he spent several hours on the floor of his hut. By March 1942, he was spitting blood and was forced to report to the infirmary where medical experiments were known to be performed. He was put in a room that was crowded with over 100 tuberculosis patients. In Dachau, there was never any attempt to cure a disease and very little care was given to the sick. During inspections of the infirmary, any patient thought to be incurable was executed. [1]
On 17 December 1944, Gaudete Sunday, a fellow prisoner, French Bishop Gabriel Piguet, secretly ordained him a priest. [3] The necessary paperwork with the authorization for the ordination, as well as other necessary items, were smuggled into the camp by "Mädi", the "Angel of Dachau", a young woman named Josefa Mack. (Mack went on to become a School Sister of Notre Dame in Munich, called Sister Maria Imma.) Some imprisoned Protestant pastors helped organize the event and a Jewish violinist played music near the barracks to create a diversion. [2]
The newly ordained priest only celebrated a single Mass and was so ill that he had to postpone his first Mass for over a week. [3] When Dachau was liberated on 4 May 1945, Leisner was taken to a sanatarium in Planegg, near Munich. He died there a few months later, on 12 August 1945.
Leisner's body was taken to Kleve and buried in a local cemetery on 20 August 1945. His remains were exhumed and re-interred in the crypt of the Cathedral of Xanten in 1966.
On a visit to Berlin in 1996, Pope John Paul II recognized Leisner as a martyr for the Catholic faith and beatified him, together with Bernhard Lichtenberg, another Nazi resister. His feast day is 12 August.
The canonization process for Leisner has not yet been completed.
Some works have been published in English about Leisner. One is The Victory of Father Karl by Otto Pies, published in 1957. It was a translation of Stephanus heute; Karl Leisner, Priester und Opfer. A radio drama adaptation was produced for "The Hour of St. Francis" with the same title. A half-hour docudrama on videotape was released by the Daughters of St. Paul in 1984, also with the same title.
Karl Leisner got to know the Schoenstatt movement as a teenager and belonged to a Schoenstatt group - which included the future Bishop of Münster, Heinrich Tenhumberg - up till his final days. Throughout his life, the few but intense times of personal encounter with Our Lady in the Original Shrine in Schoenstatt remained the decisive milestones for Karl Leisner on his path of calling. "Christ, my passion" - led by this ideal, he worked in the diocesan youth and wrestled his way to a decision for a celibate life as a priest. In the Dachau concentration camp he founded, together with Josef Fischer, the first Schoenstatt group in Dachau, which had to end its meetings in the 1942 starvation year. From 1943 Karl Leisner belonged to the group "Victor in vinculis Mariae" (victor in the shackles of Mary) and thus to the circle of Schoenstaetters around the founder Josef Kentenich. From the ideal and the fraternity of this group, Karl Leisner drew the strength to accept his fate, which was burdened by the tuberculosis of the lung as well as the difficult conditions in the concentration camp, as the will of God and to offer his life as a martyr.
Dachau was a Nazi concentration camp opened on 22 March 1933, which was initially intended to hold political prisoners. It is located on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory northeast of the medieval town of Dachau, about 16 km (10 mi) northwest of Munich in the state of Bavaria, in southern Germany. After its opening by Heinrich Himmler, its purpose was enlarged to include forced labor, and, eventually, the imprisonment of Jews, Romani, German and Austrian criminals, and, finally, foreign nationals from countries that Germany occupied or invaded. The Dachau camp system grew to include nearly 100 sub-camps, which were mostly work camps or Arbeitskommandos, and were located throughout southern Germany and Austria. The main camp was liberated by U.S. forces on 29 April 1945.
Richard Baer was a German SS officer who, among other assignments, was the commandant of Auschwitz I concentration camp from May 1944 to February 1945, and right after, from February to April 1945, commandant of Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. Following the war, Baer lived under an assumed name to avoid prosecution but was recognized and arrested in December 1960. He died in detention before he could stand trial.
Bernhard Lichtenberg was a German Catholic priest who became known for repeatedly speaking out, after the rise of Adolf Hitler and during the Holocaust, against the persecution and deportation of the Jews. After serving a jail sentence, he died in the custody of the Gestapo on his way to Dachau concentration camp. Raul Hilberg wrote: "Thus a solitary figure had made his singular gesture. In the buzz of rumormongers and sensation seekers, Bernhard Lichtenberg fought almost alone."
Peter Joseph Kentenich was a Pallottine priest and founder of the Schoenstatt Apostolic Movement. He is also remembered as a theologian, educator and pioneer of a Catholic response to an array of modern issues, whose teachings underwent a series of challenges from political and ecclesiastical powers. He attempted to teach Christians how to live out their faith. His case for sainthood is currently at the diocesan level in the diocese of Trier, pending the compilation of his writings and correspondences.
The Apostolic Movement of Schoenstatt is a Roman Catholic Marian movement founded in Germany in 1914 by Father Joseph Kentenich, who saw the movement as a means of spiritual renewal for the Catholic Church. The movement is named after the small locality of Schönstatt which is part of the town of Vallendar near Koblenz, in Germany.
The Austrian resistance launched in response to the rise in fascism across Europe and, more specifically, to the Anschluss in 1938 and resulting occupation of Austria by Germany.
Père (Father) Jacques de Jésus, O.C.D., was a French Roman Catholic priest and Discalced Carmelite friar. While serving as headmaster of a boarding school run by his Order, he took in several Jewish refugees to protect them from the Nazi government of occupation, for which he was arrested and imprisoned in various Nazi concentration camps.
August Froehlich was an Upper Silesian Roman Catholic priest. In his pastoral activity he opposed National Socialism. He campaigned in the name of German Catholics and of Polish forced labourers. He died in Dachau concentration camp.
Josef Lenzel was a German Roman Catholic priest active in resistance movement against the National Socialism, who died in the Dachau concentration camp where he had been sent as a result of his work with Polish forced labourers.
The Priest Barracks of Dachau Concentration incarcerated clergy who had opposed the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler. From December 1940, Berlin ordered the transfer of clerical prisoners held at other camps, and Dachau became the centre for imprisonment of clergymen. Of a total of 2,720 clerics recorded as imprisoned at Dachau some 2,579 were Roman Catholics. Among the other denominations, there were 109 Protestants, 22 Orthodox, 8 Old Catholics and Mariavites and 2 Muslims. Members of the Catholic Society of Jesus (Jesuits) were the largest group among the incarcerated clergy at Dachau.
Gerhard Hirschfelder was a German Roman Catholic priest. He was a vocal critic of Nazism and used his sermons to condemn Nazi propaganda and other aspects of Nazism which drew suspicion on him from the authorities who monitored him and even interrogated him on occasion. He was a staunch supporter of the role of adolescents in the life of the Church and made them a focus in his pastoral activities. In his imprisonment he became a member of the Schoenstatt Movement.
Monsignor Gabriel Piguet was the Roman Catholic Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand, France. Involved in Catholic resistance to Nazism, he was imprisoned in the Priest Barracks of Dachau Concentration Camp in 1944. He has been honoured as a Righteous Gentile by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Memorial.
The Roman Catholic Church suffered persecution in Nazi Germany. The Nazis claimed jurisdiction over all collective and social activity and the party leadership hoped to de-Christianize Germany in the long term. Clergy were watched closely, and frequently denounced, arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps. Welfare institutions were interfered with or transferred to state control. Catholic schools, press, trade unions, political parties and youth leagues were eradicated. Anti-Catholic propaganda and "morality" trials were staged. Monasteries and convents were targeted for expropriation. Prominent Catholic lay leaders were murdered, and thousands of Catholic activists were arrested.
Franz Reinisch SAC was a member of the Schoenstatt Movement. He was a Catholic priest and refused to take the oath of allegiance to Hitler, for which he was executed.
Alojs Andritzki was a German Roman Catholic priest. He was ordained as a priest just prior to the beginning of World War II in which he became a vocal critic of the Nazi regime and its actions; this earned him their ire and he was arrested before being sent to the Dachau concentration camp where he was administered a lethal injection.
Richard Henkes was a German Roman Catholic priest and professed member from the Pallottines. Henkes served as a teacher but was best known for his preaching abilities in the pulpit where he made strong-worded condemnations of Nazism and the actions the Nazis were said to have made. Henkes offered indirect assistance to the German Resistance during World War II and was one of the more vocal German priests to condemn Nazism. This often worried his superiors who believed that Henkes placed his schools at great risk. He was critical of the regime's murder of the disabled and other atrocities which forced the S.S. to arrest him. His first arrest in 1938 saw him released but his second arrest in 1943 saw him sent to the Dachau concentration camp. It was during that time that he befriended Josef Beran who taught him the Czech language.
Rosa (Hoffman) Stallbaumer was a member of the Austrian Resistance during World War II. Her name is one of 124 names of women and men from Tyrol, Austria inscribed on the Liberation Monument at The Eduard-Wallnöfer-Platz in Innsbruck in recognition of both her involvement in resisting National Socialism and of her death at Auschwitz, following her incarceration at that Nazi concentration camp as punishment for helping Jewish targets of Nazi persecution escape to Italy.
Robert Pruszkowski was a German Roman Catholic priest. A Parish priest in several towns in East Prussia, he was arrested in 1940 for hearing confessions in Polish and was held in captivity in the Priest Barracks of Dachau Concentration Camp until 1945. After World War II he worked in West Germany.
Fr. Augustin Schubert, OSA, given name František, was a Czech Roman Catholic priest, a member of the Augustinian order, and a prior of the Augustinian monastery of St. Thomas in Malá Strana, Prague. He was also an educator in the Catholic Physical Education Association, Orel (Eagle). He was a critic of the Nazi regime, and as a result, was imprisoned and died in the Dachau Concentration Camp.
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