Titus Brandsma monument

Father Titus Brandsma, priest and professor at the Catholic University of Nijmegen, died in 1942 in Dachau concentration camp because he urged Catholic newspapers not to publish Nazi propaganda.

Titus Brandsma was born in 1891 in the hamlet of Ugoclooster near Bolsward. In 1898 he joined the Carmelites. When the Catholic University of Nijmegen was founded, Titus Brandsma was appointed professor. And from 1932 to 1933 he was even Rector Magnificus at the university.

Even before the war, Brandsma saw the danger of the Nazis and warns against Nazism in numerous articles and agitates against the hatred of Jews and racial delusions of the Nazis. Even during lectures, he does not hide his horror of the Nazis. In December 1941, the Dutch media were required to include every advertisement from the NSB. Brandsma - as spiritual advisor to the Roman Catholic Journalists' Association - calls on the newspaper editors of the Catholic press to resist. Shortly afterwards he is betrayed and arrested on January 19, 1942.

On July 19, Brandsma arrives in Dachau concentration camp, where his health deteriorates noticeably and he soon ends up in the camp hospital. In the afternoon of 26 July 1942, a camp doctor from Dachau put an end to Titus Brandsma's life with a lethal injection, he turned 61. Brandsma was posthumously awarded the Resistance Cross and is a subject of veneration in Catholic circles. In 1985 Pope John Paul II beatified him and at the end of 2005 Brandsma was proclaimed the Greatest Nijmegen resident of all time by the population of Nijmegen.

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