Pastor Schneider

Pastor Schneider was a Lutheran minister who died in Buchenwald concentration camp. Karl Stern tells his story in one of his books:

During a solemn ceremony in the camp Pastor Schneider refused to take his cap off to the swastika flag. He was dragged into the bunker, the ill-famed prison within the camp, which he was destined not to leave any more. For thirteen months he suffered the tortures of a sadistic form of separate treatment. Prisoners who temporarily shared his cell were overwhelmed by the spiritual greatness of this man. In spite of nourishment which was scarcely enough to maintain life, he refused, on Friday, the day of Our Lord's death, all food.

In front of the one-story bunker was the big gathering place at which prisoners had to appear twice daily, in the morning and in the evening, to be counted ... On the high feast days one would suddenly, during the quiet of the counting, hear the powerful voice of Pastor Schneider through the grates of the bunker. Like a prophet, he made a feast-day sermon, that is to say, he tried to begin it. On Easter Sunday morning, for example, we suddenly heard the powerful words: "Thus says the Lord: I am the Resurrection and the Life!" There the prisoners were, standing in long rows, stirred to the innermost by the courage and tremendous willpower of a man. It was as if a voice from another world were calling them, as if they heard the voice of John the Baptist from the dungeons of Herod, the mighty voice of a prophet calling in the desert. He could never say more than a few sentences. Then one heard the truncheons of the guards beating him, or the blow of a fist throw his tortured body into the corner of the bunker ... Since they could make no impression on conviction which was of the hardness of granite, they declared him a madman who had to be silenced by beating. For over a year he bore the tortures of the bunker, until even his strength succumbed to brute force. There was nothing whole on his entire body when he was carried dead from the bunker.

Pastor Schneider, ora pro nobis.