A Database of European Clergy Imprisoned in Dachau Concentration Camp

This database contains information on 2,727 European clergy incarcerated in Dachau Concentration Camp. In September, 1939, as part of the Nazi campaign against Polish intellectual and community leaders, the German police and SS began to arrest local Catholic religious leaders (priests, monks, and nuns) in the parts of Poland that Germany had annexed into the Reich and throughout the rest of German-occupied Poland (the Generalgouvernement). Of at least 5,489 arrested, 2,517 died or were killed before the end of the war. Approximately one-third of these deaths (868) occurred in the Dachau concentration camp, where, in November 1940, Heinrich Himmler ordered all the Polish priests then in German camps to be centrally detained. In August 1941, after Himmler accused local religious leaders in Germany and German-occupied Europe of undermining support for the invasion of the Soviet Union and encouraging resistance, a wider range of clergy began to arrive in Dachau. This database contains biographical and geographical information on these prisoners. The compiled database is the result of careful aggregation of four publicly-available analog lists that were created by Dachau survivors (Father Bedřich Hoffmann, Jan Domagała, Reimund Schnabel, and Father Eugen Weiler); the resulting database was then independently verified against Dachau concentration camp inmate records held in the digital archive of the International Tracing Service at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. This database is made available in CSV form, with headings for each column of data.