Imprisonment in Dachau

In the autumn of 1944 Bishop Nikolai and Patriarch Gavrilo were deported from Serbia to the Dachau concentration camp, and in 1945 they were liberated by the Western Allies. That they were imprisoned at Dachau is documented; the exact dates, and above all the conditions — the “honorary prisoner” (Ehrenhäftling) question — are genuinely disputed, and this file pins the documented facts and flags the rest.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox (glorified 2003)

The Documented Core

The securely established facts are these: in 1944, Bishop Nikolai (Velimirović) and Serbian Patriarch Gavrilo V (Dožić) were removed from their confinement in Serbia (see Arrest and Vojlovica) and deported to the Dachau concentration camp near Munich; they survived; and they were liberated by advancing Western Allied (American) forces in 1945 (“Nikolaj Velimirović,” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org; “Gavrilo V, Serbian Patriarch,” Wikipedia; OrthodoxWiki, “Nicholas (Velimirović) of Žiča,” orthodoxwiki.org). That the Serbian Patriarch and the most celebrated Serbian bishop were imprisoned together in a Nazi concentration camp is not in dispute and is a central fact of the Serbian Church’s wartime experience.

Beyond this core, several particulars are contested, and the honest course is to lay the disputes out.

Disputed: The Dates and the Movements

[Disputed: the exact date of the deportation to Dachau and the timing of the release are given differently in the sources. Most accounts place the arrival at Dachau in mid-September 1944 (15 September 1944 is the date most often cited); OrthodoxWiki gives 14 December 1944. Several accounts hold that Nikolai and the Patriarch spent only a matter of weeks or a few months at Dachau (roughly two to three months) and were then removed — released from the camp proper in November/December 1944 and taken westward — before being liberated by American forces in Tyrol/Austria (near Kitzbühel) in early May 1945. Other, more devotional accounts speak more loosely of imprisonment "1944–1945" at Dachau. The secure facts are the 1944 deportation and the 1945 liberation by the Western Allies; the precise dates and the itinerary of the final months are not uniformly reported and are given here as a range, not a fixed schedule.]

Disputed: The Conditions — the “Honorary Prisoner” Question

The sharpest dispute concerns the conditions of the imprisonment, and it is not a merely antiquarian one: it bears directly on the larger controversy, because how one describes Dachau shapes how one weighs Nikolai’s suffering against the charges against him.

[Disputed: the conditions of Nikolai's and the Patriarch's imprisonment at Dachau. (a) A substantial body of reporting — reflected in the general scholarly literature and in the accounts of the camp's structure — holds that the two were held not in the general work-camp but as *Ehrenhäftlinge* ("honorary" or special prisoners) in the so-called *Ehrenbunker* / *Prominentenbunker*, the section reserved for prominent captives and high-status prisoners; that they were allowed to keep their clerical dress; that they had access to better provisions (the officers' canteen is mentioned) and to camp medical services; and that Patriarch Gavrilo himself later testified that the two were treated relatively "normally" and were not tortured. On this account the imprisonment, while real and coerced, was materially far less brutal than that of ordinary Dachau inmates. (b) A contrasting body of devotional and Serbian-Church reporting emphasizes the genuine hardship, humiliation, danger, and suffering of the imprisonment, presents the Dachau period as a profound ordeal and a purifying trial (Bishop Amfilohije Radović and others speaking of Nikolai coming "face to face with the living God" there — Byford, *Denial and Repression*, 2008), and resists the "privileged prisoner" framing as a minimization. The two accounts are not wholly irreconcilable — a specially-held prisoner still suffered real captivity and danger in a death camp — but they differ sharply in emphasis and in what they take Dachau to prove. This collection reports both and adjudicates neither.]

Two cautions are owed on this point, because it is easily abused in both directions. First, the “honorary prisoner” designation does not mean the imprisonment was comfortable, safe, or voluntary: Dachau was a concentration camp, the Ehrenbunker prisoners were captives held at the Reich’s pleasure and often in real peril, and Nikolai and the Patriarch had been deported there against their will as enemies of the regime. To use the Ehrenhäftling status to imply that Nikolai was a coddled guest, or a friend of the Nazis, is not warranted by the facts of his arrest and internment (see Arrest and Vojlovica). Second, and conversely, to describe the Dachau period only in the register of extreme martyrdom, without noting the special status that the historical record and the Patriarch’s own testimony attest, is to overstate the ordeal in a way the sources do not support. The disciplined account holds both: a real and coerced imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp, under conditions that were nonetheless materially distinguished from those of the general inmate population.

Why This Matters for the Controversy

The Dachau imprisonment is one of the pivots of the whole debate over Nikolai (see The Charge of Antisemitism). His defenders point to it as decisive evidence that he was no ally of Nazism: a man deported to a German concentration camp cannot, they argue, be assimilated to the racial antisemites who ran it, and his personal suffering under the Nazis “precludes alignment with racial antisemitism” (as the East-West Church Report summarizes the defense). His critics respond that theological or cultural antisemitism and personal victimhood at Nazi hands are not mutually exclusive — a churchman could be imprisoned by the Reich as a Serbian patriot while still having written of Jews in the terms his texts contain — and that the “honorary prisoner” conditions, and the possibility that some contested passages were composed or shaped in this period, complicate any simple reading of Dachau as vindication (Jovan Byford, Denial and Repression of Antisemitism, CEU Press, 2008, on the way the Dachau ordeal is deployed in the memory politics of the canonization). The camp, in other words, is claimed by both sides; the file simply records that both claims are made and pins what the record will and will not bear.

See Also

References

  • “Nikolaj Velimirović.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org. (The 1944 deportation to Dachau with Patriarch Gavrilo; the Ehrenhäftling / Ehrenbunker status; clerical dress, officers’ canteen, medical access; the release and liberation in 1945; used to locate these contested facts.)
  • “Gavrilo V, Serbian Patriarch.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org. (The joint imprisonment; the Patriarch’s testimony that the two were treated relatively normally and not tortured; the timeline of removal and liberation.)
  • “Nicholas (Velimirović) of Žiča.” OrthodoxWiki, orthodoxwiki.org. (The deportation date given as 14 December 1944; the liberation in 1945.)
  • Byford, Jovan. Denial and Repression of Antisemitism: Post-Communist Remembrance of the Serbian Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović. Budapest–New York: Central European University Press, 2008. (The deployment of the Dachau ordeal in the memory politics of the canonization; Bishop Amfilohije’s “face to face with the living God”; the reframing of the prison writing as prophecy.)
  • “Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović and Charges of Anti-Semitism.” East-West Church Report. (The defense argument that imprisonment at Dachau “precludes alignment with racial antisemitism.”)