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At first glance, artist Andrea Büttner’s video titled Karmel Dachau seems to offer a view at day-to-day life in a convent. She shows nuns at prayer, ironing their habits, ringing the church bells. Only later does it become apparent that the convent being portrayed is in an unusual location: right next door to the Dachau concentration camp memorial site. The northernmost guard tower of the former concentration camp is now used as a passageway for visitors to the memorial site to enter the convent’s courtyard.

The long road to the Dachau concentration camp memorial site

The founding of “Heilig Blut,” as the Carmelite convent is officially called, should be viewed in the context of the long struggle to establish a memorial site in Dachau. The U.S. authorities had returned a large portion of the former concentration camp grounds, including the old prisoners’ barracks, to the Bavarian state government in 1948, but the Bavarian government decided to use the camp buildings to house German refugees and persecution victims who had been driven out of Eastern Europe. The site was renamed Wohnsiedlung Dachau-Ost (Dachau East Residential Settlement)as a result, and memories of the concentration camp were suppressed in the public awareness.

Only the area around the former camp crematoriums, where liberated prisoners had posted improvised information back in 1945, was used for remembrance. The Bavarian Administration of Palaces, Gardens and Lakes redesigned it as a cemetery. But even this minimal form of remembrance was viewed by some politicians in the CSU party, like agriculture minister Joseph Baumgartner, as “defamation of the Dachau area” (speech delivered by Baumgartner at the Dachau Folk Festival, Süddeutsche Zeitung, August 11, 1955). It was not until the International Dachau Committee was founded by survivors and a Bavarian board of trustees was established to represent public institutions, with former concentration camp internees a large group of members, that plans for a memorial site began to take shape. Munich resident and Dachau survivor Otto Kohlhofer, who had himself been interned at the camp for aiding the communist resistance, won support for the idea from members of various political parties, and the Dachau concentration camp memorial site was finally officially dedicated in 1965. By then, construction of the “Heilig Blut” Carmelite convent was already complete. The first ten nuns had moved in at the end of 1964. 

Catholic remembrance in Dachau: “Todesangst-Christi-Kapelle” and “Heilig Blut” Carmelite convent

Johannes Neuhäusler, Auxiliary Bishop of Munich, had urged four years before that permanent religious sites should be established on the historical concentration camp grounds. While some parts of the former prison camp were still being used to house refugees, he was instrumental in the construction of a large church building on the north side of the former camp. Dubbed the Todesangst-Christi-Kapelle (Mortal Agony of Christ Chapel), it was dedicated in 1960 on the occasion of the International Eucharistic Congress, a gathering of the Roman Catholic Church that took place over several days, which was held in Munich. It was the first large-scale international event to be held in postwar Germany.

Bishop Neuhäusler’s work in Dachau was based in part on his own life story: In 1941, the SS leadership had ordered that he be taken hostage, along with other leading figures (church dignitaries, statesmen, military leaders, and diplomats), in a tract of the Dachau prison barracks. Another aspect was that the Dachau former concentration camp was generally highly significant to the Christian churches, as the SS had begun relocating all clergy members who had been imprisoned from the various prison sites in Nazi-held territory to Dachau in 1940. The 2,720 clerics imprisoned there were a minority among the over 200,000 prisoners imprisoned at the main camp and 140 satellite camps at Dachau between 1933 and 1945, but from the ecclesiastical perspective, Dachau was the central prison site, and later the central place of remembrance, for all clergy members persecuted during the Nazi era. Neuhäusler’s initiative helped to solidify this view of history.

But the auxiliary bishop’s sweeping efforts to achieve “reconciliation” wound up having disastrous consequences, as he was even willing to include Nazis in those efforts. In 1951, he joined with other representatives of the Church, reactionary forces, and former SS leaders to found a nonprofit organization called “Stille Hilfe für Kriegsgefangene und Internierte” (Silent Assistance for Prisoners of War and Interned Persons). The organization advocated on behalf of even convicted Nazi criminals and SS members, and to this day, it engages in right-wing extremist historical misrepresentation.

Still, Neuhäusler’s contribution to the establishment of the “Heilig Blut” convent is undisputed. Working on behalf of the Archbishop of Munich and Freising, Julius Cardinal Döpfner, he obtained approval for the construction from the Bavarian and American authorities and collected donations. The actual initiator of the Carmelite convent in Dachau was Sister Maria Theresia (Dr. Berta Vorbach), a Munich native. She had approached Döpfner in 1962 to propose the convent, stating, “A place where such outrages were committed, where so many people suffered unspeakably, must not be reduced to a neutral memorial site or worse, a place for sightseeing. Someone must atone for these deeds...”

Sister Maria Theresia meant the entire site of the Dachau concentration camp. Neither she nor Neuhäusler had any idea that the specific grounds where they were planning the convent, outside the former prison camp, had been part of the concentration camp years before Neuhäusler himself was held there.

The convent’s historical location: the Dachau concentration camp “game park”

These days, a sign at the passageway leading to the convent courtyard notes that over 150 concentration camp prisoners from the camp’s Strafkompanie (“penal company”) were forced to work at the site from 1937 to 1938. They were tasked with establishing a “game park” for the concentration camp’s commander, Hans Loritz, on the camp grounds. Under the heavy hand of SS guards, prisoners carried soil and construction materials to the site. They were forced to fill a gravel pit, put up fences to create game enclosures, create an artificial lake, and build a cabin. Multiple prisoners died during the backbreaking labor. Some collapsed from exhaustion, others were beaten to death by guards, and still others were driven to suicide.

The “game park” was the camp commander’s personal construction project. Loritz used the work being performed to expand the concentration camp as cover to divert construction materials and put prisoners to work for his own ends. After the park was completed, it was used for deer, wild boar, geese, and ducks. Dachau survivor Karl Röder, a social democrat, recalls wild parties Loritz held at the cabin while prisoners in the neighboring camp fought to survive. There is no trace of the excesses of the SS at the site today. The U.S. Army had been using the grounds, and part of the “game park” had already been destroyed when a new park was created in the same spot when the Carmelite convent was built: the convent garden.

Artist Andrea Büttner puts the nuns and how they deal with the site’s history at the center of her film. The nuns began working to help former prisoners in the 1980s. Sister Elija Bossler was presented with the Munich Civil Award for Democracy (Münchner Bürgerpreis für Demokratie) at the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism in 2019 for her caring efforts on behalf of survivor Max Mannheimer. The “game park” is not explicitly mentioned in Büttner’s work. But as contradictory as it may sound, even the unreal-seeming images of the peaceful natural environment in the convent garden, located right next door to the concentration camp memorial site – untouched meadows, copses of trees, a placid pond – show a place of terror: the former “game park” at the Dachau concentration camp.

By Dirk Riedel, research associate at the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism

• Elija Bossler, OCD/Johanna Kuric, OCD: “Bleiben, wo andere gehen – Leben, wo andere starben,” in: Ordenskorrespondenz.Zeitschrift für Fragen des Ordenslebens 54 (2013), Vol. 3, pp. 327–338.
• Barbara Distel: “Das Konzentrationslager Dachau nach der Befreiung,” in: Wolfgang Benz/Barbara Distel (Ed.): Der Ort des Terrors.Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, Vol. 2, Munich 2005, pp. 275–282.
• Harold Marcuse: Legacies of Dachau.The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp 1933–2001, Cambridge 2001.
• Dirk Riedel: “Der ‘Wildpark’ im KZ Dachau und das Außenlager St. Gilgen,” in: Dachauer Hefte 16 (2000), pp. 54–70.