Grave of Rev. Fr. Bernard M. Goebel -- Panna Maria TX - The Holocaust on Waymarking.com

Without minimizing the suffering of the over 10 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust (over 6 million of whom died), this waymark attempts to remind us that other groups were targeted for persecution and extinction in Hitler's Nazi Germany.

From the US Holocuast Memorial Museum website:

Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany established about 20,000 camps to imprison its many millions of victims. These camps were used for a range of purposes including forced-labor camps, transit camps which served as temporary way stations, and extermination camps built primarily or exclusively for mass murder. From its rise to power in 1933, the Nazi regime built a series of detention facilities to imprison and eliminate so-called "enemies of the state." Most prisoners in the early concentration camps were German Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats, Roma (Gypsies), Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and persons accused of "asocial" or socially deviant behavior."

Catholic priests who refused to renounce their faith were deemed one of the "asocial" groups who were ordered into concentration camps by the Nazis.

In 1940, Bernard M. Goebel was a young priest. He was arrested and sent to the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, where he and some other Catholic priests were held until liberated in 1945. They performed secret Masses and rites and served the spiritual needs of the prisoners at Dachau however they could.

Fr. Goebel (prisoner No. 22805) was one of 16 priests at Dachau who spoke in detail about his experiences to Rev. Bedrich Hoffmann, who was also held there. Rev. Hoffman wrote a book about the 2700 Catholic priests who were interened at Dachau.

Rev. Hoffman published a book in the Czech language on the persecution of the priests at Dachau, using Nazi records he had stolen and the personal testimonies he had taken. The book was called "And Who Will Kill You?"

As details of the Nazi horrors flooded out and the slow business of justice, healing, and reconciliation ground on, Fr. Goebel left Europe for the US. He arrived in the Catholic Archdiocese of San Antonio in 1951, and began serving the predominately Czech, Bohemian, and Polish residents of the area.

One of the nuns at the first church Fr, Goebel was assigned to in TX asked if he was the same Fr. Goebel who had been written about in Hoffman's book. He said he was, and she gave him a copy of Hoffman's book. Goebel had not read the book, but now translating Hoffman's account into English became something that Fr. Goebel would pursue for many decades as he worked as a pastor in several small TX parishes. A major impediment was not just the cost of publication, but also finding someone fluent enough in Czech to accurately translate not just the meaning but the power and feel of the words.

In the 1970s Fr. Goebel was assigned pastor at Immaculate Conception Catholic Church in Panna Maria. In an incredible turn of luck, Fr. Goebel would finally find the person cho would translate the book, and that person was literally in his own backyard. One of Goebel's Panna Maria parishoner's had a brother who was very highly educated and spoke fluent Czech. He was John L. Morkovsky, Bishop of the Galveston-Houston Roman Catholic diocese.

Using that connection, Fr. Goebel spoke to Rev. Benton Thurmond, a priest in Inez, TX, near Victoria. He knew both Goebel and Morkovsky, and wanted to see their project get published. Fr. Thurmond gave his life savings, around $50,000 dollars, to pay for the publication. He also served as an editor of the book.

From a newspaper artilce at the time the book was published in 1995:

"I had to be converted," Thurmond said. "I first began thinking that it was a valuable document for historians, and I got a lot of approval on that. But then after the book was near publication and the reasons for the book being published were being studied, I found that the people who were in the concentration camps were actually the true church. Their memory is to be recalled, not be forgotten."

. . .

"The book tells "a forgotten part of the Holocaust," Thurmond said."

"While 6 million Jews died under Hitler's reign of terror, several million others, including Gypsies, Poles, political protesters, artists and priests, also lost their lives."

. . .

"Hoffmann's detailed chronicle of priests' lives at Dachau and the deaths of 957 shows they, too, suffered under Nazism and that the church was not as cozy with Hitler's regime as has been suggested."

"'Any small excuse could put an innocent person behind the gates of a concentration camp,' Hoffmann wrote. 'And the chance that he would get out alive and well were less than half.'"

"The reasons for priests' imprisonment in Dachau were as odd and mercurial as other Nazi policies, according to Hoffmann's book."

"'Sometimes the Gestapo itself was puzzled about the charge to be entered for an arrest,' Hoffmann said, 'so they wrote: `Because there might arise some danger that he might work against the Reich.' In other words, there was not even a suspicion of guilt, only a possibility.'"

"Thurmond noted that "priests rapidly learned the lesson not to speak out in public, just as you would in a communist country. That was a general rule. . . They were doing that for survival. In plain language, the church had to go underground. Priests could not speak out openly.'"

"But the priests were determined to keep their faith. Hoffmann's book recounts one inmate's prayer: 'Lord, they don't want us to have you here! But you still come! In the churches you are present on the altars in gilded vessels, but here you become frugal. Here your altar is so poor, even poorer than the first altar where you lay, the manger of Bethlehem! It is the scratched-up chair of a prisoner.'"

Source: Book tells priests' tales from Dachau/Efforts by three in Texas culminate in English version of Holocaust account; CECILE S. HOLMES, SAT 09/30/1995 HOUSTON CHRONICLE, Section Religion, Page 8, 2 STAR Edition

Physical Address: Co. Rd 242 Panna Maria, TX US 78144 Date Dedicated: 06/27/2001 Supporting Website: [Web Link] Fee/Donation: none Memorial Type: Monument/Plaque

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