under the patronage of St Joseph and St Dominic

By the rivers of Babylon there we sat and wept, remembering Zion;
on the poplars that grew there we hung up our harps. . . Ps 136

THE SHADOW OF HIS WINGS

Qui habitat in adjutorio altissimi,
in protectione Dei caeli commorabitur…
Scapulis suis obumbrabit tibi,
Et sub pennis eius sperabis…
                                                         Psalm 90

“He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High, abides in the protection of the God of heaven… He will overshadow you, and you will find hope beneath his wings…”  On a dark night in April 1944, perched on the side of a hill in southern Italy, the German soldier Karl Goldmann repeated to himself the words of the psalm St Benedict had ordained for the office of Compline to master his terrors at the hands of the invading Allied forces.  “[O]f a sudden,” he wrote, “they… quieted me, and gave me trust and courage.  Fear vanished; the angels were with me.”

Karl was a reluctant soldier if a loyal one, a German patriot but anti-Nazi.  Though he used it to threaten, he never fired his gun to kill another man in all the five years he spent with the German forces.  He had been studying philosophy in preparation for the priesthood at the Franciscan seminary at Fulda when he was drafted.  His one desire was to spend his life as a missionary in Japan.  The passage to fulfillment of that dream was fraught with difficulties almost impossible to comprehend.  When, late in the War, he was tranferred with the German forces to Italy he obtained, in bizarre circumstances, episcopal permission to bring the dying the consolation of the Blessed Sacrament.  He was to carry sacred hosts until his arrest by the Allies in 1944.

After training as a cadet he had been inducted into the feared SS (Schutzstaffel—‘Protective Squadron’), the corps of Hitler’s personal henchmen, but by the providence of God avoided the mandatory tatooing.  In due course, he fell foul of the SS’s ruling clique and was sent to the eastern front as a common soldier where he distinguished himself in tending the wounded and the dying.

The life of Fr Gereon Karl Goldmann stretches the bounds of credibility in three respects: his survival amidst the German forces throughout the  course of the Second World War without a wound; his instrumentality in the conversion of innumerable hardened soldiers to the Catholic faith; and his ordination, while yet incarcerated as a prisoner of war, to the priesthood even before he had begun to study theology.  He put his good fortune, and the fulfillment of his vocation, down to the prayers and sufferings of two German nuns who devoted twenty years of their lives to interceding for him.

Fr Goldmann’s autobiography has been translated from the German by Benedict Leutenegger and re-published in a new edition.[1]