IFTTT Autopost 
Hubert Unzeitig was born on March 1, 1911 in Greifendorf, Bohemia (now called Czech Republic).
When he was 18 years old, he joined the Congregation of the Missionaries of Marianhill. In 1939, he was ordained a priest of that Order and took the name Engelmar in consecrated life.
While doing parish ministry, the Gestapo arrested him on April 21, 1941 for being a Catholic priest and preaching against Hitler’s Nazi regime. He was 30 years old. After his arrest, Fr. Engelmar was sent to Dachau Concentration Camp, where he would spend the next four years of his life.
Dachau was once described as the “largest Catholic cemetery for priests in the world” because over 2,500 Catholic seminarians, priests, and Religious were sent there, and over 1,000 died there.
In the camp, Fr. Engelmar did all he could to help the other inmates. He studied Russian, for example, so he could better serve prisoners coming from Eastern Europe.
Once, he wrote a letter that said, in part, “Even behind the hardest sacrifices and worst suffering, stands God with his fatherly love, who is satisfied with the good will of his children and gives them and others happiness.”
When a typhoid epidemic broke out in Dachau, Fr. Engelmar, along with 19 other Catholic priests, volunteered to do nursing in the typhoid barrack. Fr. Engelmar’s volunteering was no surprise, for it was not only in harmony with his ever-ready desire to serve, it was also in harmony with his Congregation’s motto: “If no one else will go, I will go.”
Of the 20 priests who served as nurses for the typhoid patients, all but two of them died from typhoid. Fr. Engelmar was one of them, dying of typhoid on March 2, 1945. Fr. Engelmar is often known as “The Angel of Dachau.”
Pope Francis beatified Engelmar on September 24, 2016 as a missionary martyr. Blessed Engelmar Unzeitig’s feast day is March 2.
