ABSTRACT
The German Reich had not yet capitulated when the influential Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich and Freising since 1917, remarked in a circular to the clerics of his diocese on 2 May 1945 that:
Blatant inhumanities, which every right-minded person abhors, have occurred in the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps. But I beg that not all of the SS, far less the people, are held responsible for these terrible things, of which they knew nothing and for any word of criticism of which they themselves would have been brought to Dachau.1
