The 20^th century was marked by wars and totalitarian regimes. In particular, violence, repression and crime cost millions of lives in Germany during the National Socialist regime.

Priests, nuns, parish priests and Bishops were the victims of anticlerical and anti-Christian propaganda nourished by atheism and hostility regards to God and the redemption revealed in Jesus Christ. In the end the Church and the faith became the targets of this terror. Humankind’s transcendent conditioning was obliged to leave space to a new faith expressed as the cult of the state and the Führer. In addition to the thousands of nameless victims and martyrs for Christ and the Church, other personalities stand out whose names have become for all the synonyms for that violence and terror. Alfred Delp, Father Maximilian Kolbe, Rupert Mayer, Edith Stein, Hermann Joseph Wehrle and Preacher at the Cathedral Maier; these people all became the victims of their tormentors due to their faith and because they unconditionally entrusted themselves to Jesus Christ.

They were courageous in their faith and vocations, in their mission and commitment. In 1980, in Munich, Pope John Paul II movingly remembered Father Rupert Mayer: "Heedless of the consequences of a serious wound received during the First World War, while administering the viaticum, he openly and courageously sided with the rights of the Church and of freedom and therefore suffered the atrocities of a concentration camp and exile"

The lives and deaths of those who, between 1933 and 1945, opposed the National Socialist terror with their own blood must never be forgotten.