Victor Dillard, SJ, Spiritual Resister and Apostle to the Sto Slave Laborers in Germany, Martyred at Dachau

Victor Dillard is chiefly remembered today for his valiant role as spiritual apostle among the slave laborers in Germany, sent there by the notorious STO (Service du Travail Obligatoire) law drafted by the Vichy Government, which forced some 700,000 Frenchmen to work in German industrial centers in order to aid and abet the Third Reich’s war effort. Encountering the absolute refusal of the Nazi authorities to allow chaplains to be sent to assist these mostly young men abandoned and subjected to wretched and demoralizing working conditions, the French Catholic Hierarchy circumvented this interdiction by sending priests and religious clandestinely into Germany as “volunteer workmen.” Then a very well-known Jesuit priest, Victor Dillard offered to participate in this effort; so in October of 1943 at the age of 47 and the oldest of his group, he disguised himself with false papers, claiming to be an electrician and head of a family of five. Assigned to a factory at Wuppertal, some 40 kilometers north of Cologne and enduring a work schedule sometimes as long as 72 hours a week, he nevertheless was able to reach out to all the conscripts in the area and pursued a religious and social ministry on many levels. Denounced to the Gestapo for his “anti-German activities,” he was jailed, convicted as a foreign agent, and sentenced to hard labor at Dachau where, due to abysmal living conditions and sadistic treatment, he succumbed in six weeks after an operation to amputate one of his legs.
In his recent and timely biography, Philippe Verrier insists on the need to examine fully the life and times of Victor Dillard. Writing with admiration for the Jesuit priest, yet objectively and without hagiographical intent, he explores chronologically the many different aspects and phases of Dillard’s remarkably rich life and career ranging from his early family life and education, military experience and citations for valor; formation in the Jesuit Order and career as an inspiring pedagogue; entry onto the international scene and growth as a respected and much published political economist; Dillard as inveterate traveler throughout Europe and the United States (where he was welcomed to the White House by President Roosevelt); his sojourn as spiritual counselor at Vichy where from the pulpit he became a most outspoken critic of the Pétain regime and the Nazi ideology (thus gaining the accolade as “the only courageous man at Vichy” by the BBC spokesperson Maurice Schumann from London); expulsion from Vichy and a chronicle (mostly drawn from his own prison writings) of his six months as worker priest in Germany; imprisonment at Barmen and a narrative of his martyrdom and death at Dachau, including testimonies by several fellow prisoners who lived closely by his side during this period.
The biography fills an important lacuna in the history of the spiritual resistance by providing a central and unifying figure to describe its activities and commitment which diverge from the perhaps too rigidly drawn dimensions of the Resistance described as primarily a patriotic and para-military operation. Armed only with his Christian faith and humanistic ideals, Dillard employed spiritual and moral means in waging the battle against the pernicious ideology of Nazism; and he offered up his own life to shield a younger generation lying prostrate under the Nazi boot from the vicious attempts coming from many quarters to Nazify their hearts and minds.