22 March 1933. Heinrich Himmler announced the establishment of the "first concentration camp" at Dachau. On the map of Polish martyrdom, this camp occupies an important place. The first Polish prisoners arrived here on 16 September 1939, just 15 days after the Third Reich attacked Poland. By the camp's liberation on 29 April 1945, more than 40,000 Poles and Polish Jews had been sent to KL Dachau. One in four of them died on the spot. Among the prisoners, the clergy were treated particularly brutally. The stay and martyrdom of Polish priests in the camp is commemorated by a monument with a representation of the suffering Christ by the Polish sculptor Benedykt Tofil (1929-2017), which was placed on the back wall of the Fear of Christ Before Death chapel in 1972.

Commemoration of the clergy at Dachau

In 1960, a Roman Catholic chapel dedicated to the Fear of Christ Before Death was built at the northern end of the former Dachau concentration camp site. The chapel was the first sacred space and memorial to the priests imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp.

The chapel was located on the site of the former camp function buildings, which were demolished at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s. Johannes Neuhäusler (1888-1973), a prominent theologian and one-time prisoner of KL-Sachsenhausen and then KL-Dachau, was the initiator of the construction of the temple on the site of the camp. The monumental stone building in the shape of a cylinder with a narrow gap facing the main axis of the former camp was designed by the German architect Josef Wiedemann (1910-2001). The structure was covered with a crown of thorns made of copper. Erected in 1960, the shrine was consecrated later that year on 5 August on the occasion of the 37th World Eucharistic Congress, with 50,000 people attending the ceremony.

Statue of the Suffering Christ by Benedict Tofil

The back wall of the chapel, where a more modest plaque brought by Polish priests (now in the collection of the Dachau Museum) was located between 1970 and 1972, is decorated with a statue of a seated emaciated Christ wearing a crown of thorns. The author of the expressionistic composition highlighting Christ's pain is the Polish sculptor Benedykt Tofil. On either side of the figure are four plaques with the inscription (in Polish, French, German and English): "HERE IN DACHAU EVERY THIRD MARTYRED PERSON WAS A POLE EVERY SECOND POLISH PRIEST IMPRISONED HERE SACRIFICED HIS LIFE THEIR SACRED MEMORY IS HONOURED BY FELLOW POLISH PRIESTS".

The bronze statue and plaques were funded by priests gathered in the Committee of Polish Priests of Former Prisoners of the Dachau Concentration Camp. The monument was unveiled on 20 August 1972 by a former prisoner of KL-Dachau, later Archbishop of Szczecin-Kamień, Kazimierz Jan Majdański (1916-2007).