April 07th, 2018

When Hitler and his death troops invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Father Johann Baczek resided in Łódź, a city that would be taken over by the Socialist Germans, on September 8, 1939, and renamed Litzmannstadt.
The city was in a larger section of Poland that was occupied by the German Socialists and named Reichsgua Wartheland.
Father Baczek, a professor of moral theology and canon law in Łódź Theological Seminary, was a Catholic, a scholar and a true intellectual, which caused him to earn the label of a political enemy of the German Socialists.
Father Baczek was arrested, on October 6, 1941, swept up in the mass arrests of Polish Catholic priests on the 6th and 7th of October 1941, in Reichsgua Wartheland.
The arrests followed the September 13, 1941 Socialist German's implentation of the decree of "Without God, Without Religion, Without Priest and Sacrament," in the German-occupied Warthegau.
That policy of German Socialist Arthur Greiser (the governor of Wartheland) dissolved the Roman Catholic Church and replaced it with the Catholic German National Church, separate from the Vatican and subject to German law.

After the arrest of Father Baczek, he was temporarily imprisoned in Konstantynów and then transported to Dachau extermination camp, on October 30, 1941, where he received the number 28362.
To his final destination, he was shipped to Hartheim Euthanasia Center, where he was exterminated, gassed to death in a gas chamber, on May 4, 1942, the same day as Father Jan Bak, from the Gniezno-Poznań archdiocese in Poland.
VIVA CRISTO REY! Niech żyje Chrystus Król!