When an American Catholic G.I. entered the front gate of the infamous Dachau concentration camp in 1945, he looked around and thought, 'This is what hell is like!'
From lifesitenews.com and written by David Barton Fri Jul 18, 2025 - 11:29 am EDT: What we can learn from the 2000+ priests imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp - LifeSite
"(LifeSiteNews) — When 19-year-old American GI James Frank Dorris, Jr. entered the front gate of the infamous Dachau concentration camp during its liberation in April 1945, he looked around and thought to himself, “This is what hell is like!” His eyes beheld the dead and walking dead, his nose assaulted by the odor of the outflow of the camp crematorium, a building incapable of disposing of the unimaginable volume of dead inmates.
During the horrendous last four months of Dachau’s existence during World War II, an estimated 100 detainees per day died of starvation, disease, or a bullet. Some days it was 400. A wartime shortage of coal made it impossible to cremate the growing numbers. Hence, bodies were stacked everywhere throughout what some called a death camp. Holocaust Encyclopedia estimates 40,000 detainees died at Dachau under the most brutal of conditions.
Decades later, Mr. Dorris, a Roman Catholic, provided his Dachau recollections to the Library of Congress. He said, “And in my mind I imagined the devil himself coming up out of the ground. And I looked up in the sky and I said, ‘God, get me out of this place!’” When young PFC Dorris walked through the gates of Dachau, he entered a realm of Satanic dystopia: a landscape of mass starvation, louse-borne typhus epidemic, sadistic torture, and grotesque medical experimentation.
Persona Christi
Yet within this hell-scape of despair, God placed hope.
Dachau became the landing spot of all priests captured by the Third Reich. Dachau housed the infamous “Priest Barracks” – three barracks buildings where, remarkably, 2,579 Catholic priests, religious, and seminarians filtered through Dachau between 1938 and 1945. The Priest Barracks also contained another 141 ministers of other faiths, bringing the total to 2,720 souls. In all, 95% were priests.
Except for a few short months, the priests enjoyed no special prisoner privileges. To the contrary, because of the Nazis’ hatred and fear of Holy Mother Church, the priests were a constant target of abuse by Dachau authorities. Although dressed the same as other prisoners, the authorities knew which prisoners were priests – and directed their relentless ire toward them.
Over the years, 314 priests were released by the Nazis from Dachau, but, tragically, at least 1,034 were not. These brave, martyred priests succumbed to death via starvation, disease, bullet or in the gas chamber of Hartheim Castle in Austria, where Dachau’s “disabled and undesirable” were shipped. On liberation day, there remained only 1,240 priests and religious to be freed.
Throughout Dachau’s hellish existence, the one and only refuge for these priests and the many Catholic laymen imprisoned with them was their Catholic Faith. These holy priests kept the flames of faith, hope and charity burning. At great danger to themselves, priests would secretly distribute Holy Communion to Catholics in other barracks within the compound; reciting “Corpus Domini Nostri” while placing the Sacred Host on their tongues.
Distributing Holy Communion was not the priests’ only dangerous occupation. Priests would secretly hear Confessions of prisoners as they walked together under the watchful eye of camp guards – the prisoners whispering their sins, and the priest reciting the words of absolution in Latin. So inspiring were these priests that many unbaptized prisoners chose to receive yet another Sacrament; they were covertly baptized by these priests into the Roman Catholic Church according to the Tridentine Rite.
And then there was Holy Mass.
As odd as it may seem, there were occasions between 1941 and 1945 when the Holy Mass was offered at Dachau. The camp even had a chapel of sorts. Of course, even when Mass was allowed by the Nazis, laymen were usually forbidden from attending. Still, that modest little chapel was a fountain of grace and hope for the tortured detainees.
In his brilliant book The Priest Barracks, Guillaume Zeller wrote, “Although the regulations that were imposed upon the chapel may have caused some difficult episodes, this place remained the source of comfort for those who had the chance to get there freely or secretly.”
READ: Polish priest martyred by the Communists after WWII beatified in Krakow
The traditional Catholic ‘glue’
In this most vile, desperate, and foreboding place, what Holy Catholic Mass had the power to unite these fractured men, hailing from nearly a dozen different European nations, each with its own language? It was the most common Mass of the day – it was the Mass of the Ages, the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM). It was the Holy Mass all Catholic detainees knew, regardless of language.
German prisoner Joseph Rovan reflected on assisting at Mass in Dachau: “The priest was saying the same Latin words that all his confreres, at the same hour, were repeating in their morning Masses throughout the world. No longer could I recall the world of the concentration camp. Each one, for precious moments, was restored to his original, fragile, and indestructible dignity . . . On the way out, in the pale light of the early morning, one felt capable of facing a little better the hunger and fear.”
In addition to offering the TLM and dispensing other Sacraments in Latin at Dachau, all priests of the early 20th century,including those imprisoned at Dachau, were well-schooled in Latin. Mr. Zeller’s book notes that the prisoner-priests would often converse in Latin with each other when there was otherwise a language barrier.
Latin was a key ingredient to the traditional Catholic glue that bound the captive priest and laymen to Our Dear Lord in the daily hell that was Dachau.
Today, 80 years after the liberation of Dachau, Holy Mother Church finds herself somehow embroiled in a debate about celebrating the TLM, about Catholic Tradition – and even about Latin itself! Some Catholic bishops have curtailed or even eliminated entirely the TLM in their dioceses. Some have decreed that Latin cannot even be used in the Novus Ordo Missa. Even in diocesan churches allowing the TLM, it is forbidden to publicize the TLM in parish bulletins. For some, the TLM has been banished.
Earlier this year the renowned Cardinal Robert Sarah commented about the suppression of the TLM, saying: “This project, if it is true, seems to me to be an insult to the history of the Church and to the Sacred Tradition, a diabolical project that seeks to break with the Church of Christ, the apostles and the saints.”
And in June Cardinal Raymond Burke called upon recently-elected Pope Leo XIV to end what the Cardinal called “persecution from within the Church” of Catholics who attend the TLM. So we ask: How long will the persecution of Catholics who yearn for the Catholic (i.e. universal) Mass continue? How much longer will the Church downplay her universal Latin language? In short, how long will she deny her rich patrimony?
It is indeed a turbulent time within the true Church, but Catholic history records that all persecutions eventually come to an end. It will be the same with this internal persecution of Traditional Catholics.
Since the Dachau Catholic captives knew a thing or two about “persecution,” perhaps it is wise to look for solace from their heroic example. Father Andre Morelli, a French Augustinian prisoner-priest advised a Catholic lay prisoner in the midst of their Dachau-Hell, “What supports you is the grace that God sends you in this present moment.” Father Morelli’s succinct, yet profound advice is a Catholic lesson for every age – including this one."'
End of very inspiring and revealing article...
And the current cabal in Rome and their faithless bishops are squashing and smashing the TLM?
That can't go on!
Pray for the defeat of the modernist monsters currently occupying the seats of power in the Vatican!
Viva Cristo Rey! Bl. Fr. Miguel Pro, Fr. Emil Kapaun and Fr. Vincent Capodanno, pray for us...
St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle...
St. Joseph pray for us!!
Gene DeLalla
