Engelmar Unzeitig

Engelmar Unzeitig was born Hubert Unzeitig on 1 March 1911 in Greifendorf, a German-speaking village in Moravia that then belonged to Austria-Hungary and is today Huzová in the Czech Republic. He grew up in a Catholic rural setting and as a young man entered the Society of Mary, the religious congregation of the Marianists founded by William Joseph Chaminade. In religious life he took the name Engelmar. He completed philosophical and theological studies in the 1930s and was ordained a priest on 6 August 1939, on the eve of the Second World War.

His first pastoral assignment was to the parish of Glöckelberg in the Bohemian Forest, a district that after the Munich Agreement of 1938 had been annexed to the German Reich. There he served a largely German-speaking Catholic population at a time when National Socialist racial teaching was being forced upon church and public life. Unzeitig would not trim his preaching to that ideology. He insisted that every person had dignity before God and spoke in defense of Jews then being persecuted. Those sermons led to his denunciation. The Gestapo arrested him in April 1941. After interrogation and imprisonment he was sent in June 1941 to the Dachau concentration camp, where the regime had already confined large numbers of priests and religious from across occupied Europe.

In Dachau he lived in the priests' barracks under hunger, forced labor, and constant threat of violence. Fellow prisoners later described him as quietly generous: he shared scarce food, heard confessions, and tried to keep hope alive. In order to minister to inmates from the Soviet Union and other eastern territories who had no priest of their own language, he taught himself Russian. During the winter of 1944–1945 a typhus epidemic swept the camp. Unzeitig volunteered to care for the contagious sick in the isolation blocks, knowing that infection was almost inevitable. He contracted typhus and died on 2 March 1945, the day after his thirty-fourth birthday and only weeks before American troops liberated the camp. Survivors remembered him as the Angel of Dachau. Like many who died there, he has no known personal grave; camp dead were commonly cremated.

After the war his reputation for holiness was kept alive especially among the Marianists and in the Diocese of Würzburg, with which the German province of his congregation was closely linked. The Catholic Church opened a cause for his beatification. On 24 September 2016 he was beatified in Würzburg Cathedral. Cardinal Angelo Amato, then prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, presided as representative of Pope Francis. Blessed Engelmar Unzeitig is commemorated on 2 March. He has not been canonized. His life is invoked as an example of priestly fidelity, public refusal of racial hatred, and self-sacrifice for the imprisoned and the sick under a totalitarian regime.