Pastors' Barracks by Robert L. Wise

A novel based on the experience of a German minister who survived the Nazi death camp

Christian Reger's quiet storybook world began to collapse in the frenzy of 1939 prewar Germany. Christian Reger was a minister in the Confessing Church in Germany. This church was a branch of the German state church under the leadership of Martin Niemoller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It opposed Hitler and sought to undermine the Nazis reign of terror as an expression of their Christian faith. Reger's organist informed the authorities of his underground work and the Gestapo arrested Reger and shipped him to the concentration camp at Dachau, where 10 percent of the prisoners were men of the cloth. There Reger and the other prisoners of Barracks No. 26-nicknamed the Pastors' Barracks-came face to face with man's inhumanity to man.