Custody for consecrated wafers used by the wife of Eugen Bolz, a Catholic and opponent of the Nazi regime who was beheaded on January 23, 1945; thanks to it Bolz received Communion despite being forbidden to do so by his jailers.
Eugen Bolz, a Catholic politician, Zentrum deputy to the Reichstag for more than twenty years and then President of the State of Baden-Wuerttemberg until Hitler came to power, was murdered in a Berlin prison in January 1945. “The Church,” he wrote, “must have the right to take action against those laws that endanger the vital interests of the Churches and the good of believers. If a law contradicts natural laws or divine law, it cannot, according to Catholics, bind the conscience. Faced with the obvious and repetitive use of violence by the state, the people have the right to revolt.” As early as the summer of 1933 he was interned in a concentration camp because he publicly opposed National Socialism in the name of his faith as a Catholic. Freed, he had various contacts with the resistance group of Carl Goerdeler, former mayor of Leipzig. After the July 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler, in which he had taken no part, he was arrested and sentenced to death. To his daughter and wife, who had secretly brought him Communion several times in prison, he had written before his death, “I have prepared myself inwardly for months for this moment. I must take leave of you and of life. It is very difficult for me to leave you. Please accept it as the cross the Lord has willed for me. I at least have the grace to die prepared and perhaps escape a difficult time.”