December 3: Father Bernhard Lichtenberg

Father Bernhard Lichtenberg, a German priest who spoke out actively against Nazism and its persecution of Jews, was born in Lower Silesia on this date in 1875. After the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933, Lichtenberg became an advocate of civil and human rights for Jews and sought in vain to get the Catholic Church involved in this cause. As head of the Church’s Relief Office in Berlin, he enabled many endangered Catholics of Jewish descent to leave the Third Reich. Following the Kristallnacht pogrom of November, 1938, he intensified his protests against Nazi brutality and prayed publicly for Jews and other victims of Nazism from his pulpit in the St Hedwig Cathedral. Lichtenberg was jailed for two years in 1942, but refused the Gestapo’s offer to leave him in peace if he would halt his protests. Instead, he was sent to Dachau, where he died at age 67. Yad Vashem named Lichtenberg as one of its “Righteous Among the Nations” on July 7, 2004.

“I reject with my innermost the evacuation [deportation of Jews] with all its side effects, because it is directed against the most important commandment of Christianity, ‘You shall love your neighbor as much as you love yourself.’ And I recognize the Jew too as my neighbor, who possesses an immortal soul, shaped after the likeness of God. However, since I cannot prevent this governmental measure, I have made up my mind to accompany the deported Jews and Christian Jews into exile, in order to give them spiritual aid. I wish to use this opportunity to ask the Gestapo to give me this opportunity.” —Father Bernhard Lichtenberg