Alois Andritzki

Blessed Alois Andritzki, known in Upper Sorbian as Alojz Andritzki, was a German Roman Catholic diocesan priest of Sorbian nationality who died as a martyr in the Dachau concentration camp. He was born in 1914 in Radibor (Radwor), a predominantly Sorbian village in Upper Lusatia in the Kingdom of Saxony, then part of the German Empire. His family was Catholic and culturally Sorbian, and priestly vocations were numerous in the household; two of his brothers also became priests. In that milieu he received a religious upbringing and a secondary education that prepared him for seminary. He studied theology for the Diocese of Meissen and was ordained to the priesthood in 1939, only weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War.

The newly ordained priest was sent to Dresden, where he served as a chaplain attached to cathedral and parish ministry. He worked especially among young people and remained active in Sorbian Catholic circles, at a moment when the National Socialist government was determined to suppress both independent Church youth work and the public life of the Sorbian minority. Andritzki was remembered as artistically gifted as well as pastorally zealous; he drew and painted and used such gifts in catechesis and in small publications. His jokes and remarks about the regime, his pastoral independence, and his Sorbian identity were reported to the authorities. In 1941 the Gestapo arrested him in Dresden on political charges connected with alleged hostile statements against the state.

From Dresden he was transferred to Dachau, the camp in Bavaria that the SS used as a principal prison for Catholic clergy from Germany and occupied Europe. Confined in the priests’ block, he sought to maintain a hidden pastoral life among the prisoners, celebrating or assisting at clandestine worship when possible and encouraging fellow inmates. During Advent and Christmas of 1942 he helped fashion a nativity scene from scraps of wood and other found materials, a gesture later recalled as a sign of hope in the camp. In the winter of 1942–1943 he contracted typhus, which was rampant among prisoners. When he was gravely ill and asked for the Eucharist, medical personnel of the camp administered a lethal injection rather than ordinary care. He died in Dachau in February 1943, not yet twenty-nine years old.

After his death the camp authorities had his body cremated, and an urn of ashes was eventually delivered to his family, who buried it in the churchyard at Radibor. In the postwar decades his reputation for holiness and martyrdom spread in the Diocese of Dresden-Meissen and among Sorbs. A canonical process examined his life and the circumstances of his death and concluded that he had been killed in hatred of the faith. Pope Benedict XVI approved his beatification, which was proclaimed in Dresden in 2011; Andritzki thus became the first member of the Sorbian people to be beatified. His feast is kept on 3 February. Relics were later translated from Radibor to the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Dresden, where he is venerated as a priest-martyr of the twentieth century and a symbol of Catholic and Sorbian endurance under totalitarian persecution.