Remembering three martyrs 80 years after the end of World War II

May 8th marked the eightieth anniversary of the end of World War II, the bloodiest conflict in human history, in which more than fifty million human lives were lost.

Today, our world is once again marked by bloody conflict, and it is an appropriate time to remember three unsung blessed martyrs of that cruel period—Bernhard Lichtenberg, Stefan Wincenty Frelichowski, and Emilian Kovch—as intercessors for our war-torn world.

The eightieth anniversary of the end of the war coincided with the election of Pope Leo XIV. The first words of our new Holy Father upon stepping out onto the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica were: “Peace be with you all!” The successor of St. Peter certainly understands that one of the major tasks of his young pontificate is to be a spokesman of peace.

The two best-known Catholic martyrs of the Second World War are Saints Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish Franciscan friar who volunteered to die in Auschwitz so that a family man could live, and Edith Stein, the German-Jewish convert and Carmelite murdered in that same camp.

Yet, many other heroic Catholic martyrs deserve to be better known. Here are three.

“Christ Is My Fuhrer”

Bernhard Lichtenberg (1875-1943) was born in Lower Silesia during the Kulturkampf, when Otto von Bismarck, the first German chancellor, regarded Catholics with great suspicion. Afraid that they were not true Germans, as their primary loyalties were to Rome, beyond the mountains (Alps; hence the term ultramontanism, derived from ultra montanes), he harassed them. Ordained in Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland), Lichtenberg worked as a vicar in Berlin, which Brenda L. Gaydosh, the author of an outstanding biography of the martyr, described as the most liberal and secular city in Germany, possibly Europe.

Although Lichtenberg had experienced anti-Catholicism all his life, he had no reservations about walking the streets of decadent Berlin in a cassock and ringing a bell. Hostile glances and insults did not make him cowardly. Perhaps that was what prepared him for his future heroic outspokenness.

In 1933, the Nazi Party gained power in Germany. The nation’s Catholic bishops remembered the ugly Kulturkampf and were afraid of once again being labelled an unpatriotic fifth column. When the Catholic Center Party was harassed and Catholic education was restricted, the bishops protested cautiously; however, after Kristallnacht on the night of November 9-10, 1938, during which synagogues and Jewish businesses across Germany and Austria (part of the Reich since March) were destroyed, at least 91 Jews were directly murdered, and another 30,000 were deported to concentration camps, the bishops largely remained mum.

Unfortunately, some bishops got cozy with the regime. Cardinal Adolf Bertram of Breslau ordered that church bells ring out to celebrate the German conquest of Poland in 1939 and France one year later. After Germany annexed Austria, Cardinal Innitzer of Vienna couldn’t resist publicly praising fellow Austrian Hitler.

One noble exception was Konrad von Preysing, the bishop of Berlin, made a cardinal in 1946. Preysing aided Jews and publicly denounced their mistreatment. In this, he found an ally in Father Lichtenberg, then the provost of St. Hedwig’s cathedral. After Kristallnacht, Lichtenberg regularly led prayers for Jews, non-Aryan Christians, and concentration camp inmates. He denounced antisemitism, and in one homily, firmly told a prejudiced parishioner: “You will also sit at the table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and whosoever that does not suit, he will remain outside.”

Lichtenberg’s regular prayers for the Jews led to his being detained by the Gestapo many times. During one interrogation, he stated that Christ was his Fuhrer; this was the best ultramontanism. Apart from denouncing the Reich’s antisemitism, Lichtenberg sent a letter to Leonardo Conti, Reich Minister of Public Health, denouncing Aktion T4, the state-sanctioned mass murder of people with disabilities, the elderly, and psychiatric patients.

Eventually, the regime lost its patience with Lichtenberg for his protests and arrested him. Von Preysing intervened in vain to try and save the priest, noting that he suffered from multiple kidney and heart ailments; Lichtenberg died during transport to Dachau. In 1996, St. John Paul II beatified this great voice in the wilderness at Berlin’s Olympic stadium, once the site of Nazi rallies.

The St. Damien of Dachau

Many Catholics are familiar with St. Damien (1840-1889), who ministered to society’s ultimate outcasts at a leper colony on the Hawaiian island of Molokai, where he contracted leprosy and died. There is a lesser-known Catholic hero, Blessed Stefan Wincenty Frelichowski (1913-1945), whose life and martyrdom contain striking parallels to St. Damien.

Stefan Wincenty, known by the diminutive form of his middle name, “Wicek,” was one of six children of a baker in Chełmża in Pomerania, northern Poland. From his youth, Wicek was active in scouting and dreamed he would likewise be the patriarch of a large family; he even fell in love with a girl named Agnieszka (the feeling was mutual). Yet Wicek felt an increasingly strong call to the priesthood and entered the seminary in Pelplin. However, studying for the priesthood did not mean abandoning his vocation to fatherhood; Wicek had an epiphany that after ordination, he would be a father to his congregation.

After receiving holy orders, Wicek briefly worked at the Holy Trinity Parish in Wehjerowo and eventually became a vicar at the Parish of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the old medieval city of Torun. There, Father Frelichowski became a charismatic preacher, youth minister, and scoutmaster; his Sunday congregation continually swelled. Like St. Damien, he wanted to go on a mission to a leper colony, but the outbreak of war cancelled those plans.

On September 1^st, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and the bloodiest conflict in human history officially began. Especially in the areas of northern and western Poland directly annexed to the Third Reich, the Germans attempted to kill off the nation’s intellectual and religious leaders capable of fomenting resistance; as part of the genocidal operation against the intelligentsia, about 100,000 Poles were murdered. The Catholic clergy was among the most affected groups: of 9,763 diocesan priests, nearly a fifth (1,863) were murdered.

After the invasion, Wicek was arrested along with most other Torun priests. Initially, he was detained at the Fort VII prison in the city, from where he was deported to the Stutthof concentration camp outside Gdansk/Danzig. While at Stutthof, Wicek was transported to Grenzdorf, where he was to work in a quarry. The majority of priests who worked at Grenzdorf perished from the harsh working conditions. Yet, miraculously, Wicek was quickly sent back to Stutthof. Krystyna Podlaszewska, the author of a fine Polish-language biography of Frelichowski, writes that this may have been the work of Divine Providence, as he had a mission to fulfill in the camps where he would later be interned.

After Stutthof, Frelichowski was sent to Sachsenhausen outside Berlin, and from there to Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp and the ultimate cemetery of Polish priests: according to Guillame Zeller’s excellent book The Priest Barracks, 2,720 priests were jailed at the camp; 1,034 of them died. About 84 percent of murdered clergy were Polish Catholic priests.

Wicek celebrated the Eucharist in camp barracks (hosts were sometimes hidden in bread sent in packages addressed to inmates) and heard confessions. However, he was not motivated by proselytism; sometimes, dying Protestant or irreligious inmates asked for his words of consolation, which Wicek readily gave. While bread and especially medicine were rare luxuries in the camps, Wicek shared them with dying prisoners whenever they fell into his hands.

At Dachau, he befriended two German political prisoners, Eduard Pesendorfer and Joseph Pups, who received no packages; he asked his own family in occupied Poland to send them food. This was an exceptional work of mercy, as not only did it require overcoming the natural resentment most Poles felt towards Germans, but these two inmates were probably communists. The fact that they espoused an ideology hostile to Christ and His Church did not matter to Wicek.

Wicek’s celebration of the sacraments was initially done clandestinely. Eventually, however, camp authorities allowed him and more than thirty other Polish priests who volunteered to minister to the dying. Biographer Podlaszewska believes that their agreement to this likely resulted from the fact that they hoped they would become infected by the diseased and die more quickly. Due to the appalling sanitary conditions at Dachau, typhus and dysentery epidemics broke out. Wicek was aware of the consequences and spent much time picking lice off his uniform.

He eventually caught typhus and died, just three months before American troops liberated Dachau; Pope St. John Paul II beatified him a martyr in Torun in 1999.

The Parish Priest of Majdanek

Emilian Kovch (1884-1944) was a Ukrainian Greek-Catholic priest; he was also the son of a priest. He was born in western Ukraine, which in 1918 became a part of the restored Polish state. Poles and Ukrainians fought over the region, and eventually, west Ukrainian nationalism grew violent (Ukrainian nationalists assassinated, for instance, the Polish Minister of the Interior Bolesław Pieracki in 1934), while the Polish state responded by pacifying Ukrainian villages and arresting Ukrainian activists.

Because he was engaged in the Ukrainian independence movement, Emilian Kovch aroused the suspicions of the Warsaw government. Yet he rejected the violent methods some of his compatriots used to fight. As a parish priest in Peremyshliany near Lviv, he preached harmony between Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews, the three principal ethnic groups in the area. He worked to increase his parishioners’ religious life, organizing numerous Eucharistic congresses in Peremyshliany as an alternative to the cancer of hateful nationalism.

When the Soviets invaded eastern Poland in 1939, he protested when some of Peremyshliany’s Ukrainians looted the homes of Poles arrested by the NKVD. The Ukrainians had ample reasons to distrust the Soviets; in 1932-1933, Stalin starved millions of Ukrainian peasants in the genocidal famine known as the Holodomor. Thus, it is unsurprising that after Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 some Ukrainians hoped that the Nazi Germans would treat them better and maybe even create an independent Ukraine. Yet Blessed Emilian had no illusions; he commented: “One ‘benefactor’ has replaced another. The buttons on his uniform are all that have changed.”

Kovch implored young Ukrainians not to join the German-controlled auxiliary police. When the German occupiers hounded Peremyshliany’s Jews into the local synagogue and set it ablaze, Father Emilian risked his life and stormed into the burning building, pulling some Jews out. Speaking fluent German, he yelled at the troops by the synagogue to go away; oddly enough, they listened.

Another way that Father Emilian aided Peremyshliany’s Jews was by catechizing and baptizing them, thanks to which he saved many from deportation. Yet as a result of such “crimes,” he was eventually deported to Majdanek. Like Father Wicek in Dachau, Father Emilian brought consolation and the sacraments to inmates irrespective of their nationality in Majdanek, where he eventually died from a purulent leg inflammation. When his bishop tried to arrange for Kovch’s release, the priest declined, stating that his place was Majdanek. In one letter from the camp, he wrote:

I thank God for His mercy. Outside heaven, [Majdanek] is the only place where I’d like to be. We are all equal here: Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, Russians, Lithuanians, and Estonians. I am the only priest here, and I can’t imagine what they’d do without me.

During his historic 2001 visit to Ukraine, St. John Paul II beatified Kovch and twenty-six other Greek-Catholic martyrs of the twentieth century.

Reading about the lives of these three blessed martyrs of Nazi concentration camps, it is difficult to not see parallels with today’s world. Are there not many refugees devastated by wars who need the consolation of someone like Blessed Wicek or Blessed Emilian? And should we not publicly decry the evils around us like Blessed Bernhard?

May these three great martyrs serve as our intercessors in our prayers for a peaceful world.