Das Tagebuch des Abbé Stock (WT)

In January 1942, the German Catholic priest Franz Stock began a "diary of those shot" in occupied Paris. By August 1944, he would note and comment on a total of 863 executions that he had witnessed. Franz Stock gave the executed people spiritual support and a last escort. The Wehrmacht had appointed him as chaplain to those whom the occupying forces had imprisoned in the Paris prisons and condemned to death: Resistance fighters, hostages, spies. For a few, Franz Stock became a lifesaver. For those condemned to death, he gives back what was taken from them in the first place: their dignity.

Franz Stock's "Diary of the Shot" from Paris ranks alongside the notes of Anne Frank from Amsterdam and Adam Czerniaków from the Warsaw ghetto. It is a documentary indictment of the barbarity of the Nazis and at the same time a historical testimony with timeless significance that brings to mind the wars and occupying regimes of today. "Abbé" Stock, a Catholic German priest in occupied Paris, was revered as a hero in France after the war for his work and his humanity. He was a pioneer of reconciliation between the Germans and the French.