Father Józef Bigus: A Polish cleric in the Nazi terror system
The life story of a Catholic priest who survived years of detention in concentration camps
Father Józef Bigus survived five years in German concentration camps and as a victim of medical experiments. When he left the Dachau concentration camp in 1945, he had endured imprisonment, forced labor, and subjection to medical experiments. His life story mirrors the extent to which the National Socialist regime persecuted clerics and intellectuals. It was only decades later, in 2025, that his family received information and copies of documents about his fate—and thus regained an important piece of memory.
On December 14, 1940, in the framework of the so-called “Intelligenzaktion” (literally “Intelligentsia Operation”), the Nazis deported numerous Catholic clerics to the Dachau concentration camp. One of them was the Polish priest Józef Bigus. Like many Polish clerics, teachers, and social activists, he was subjected to persecution. He endured the horrors of the camps and was a victim of medical experiments.
Józef Bigus was born in Gowidlino in Kartuzy County, Poland, on February 3, 1908. His parents were Jan Bigus and Paulina, née Gruba. He decided early on to pursue a career as a Catholic priest.
Arrest, forced labor, and camp imprisonment
The Gestapo arrested Father Bigus in Toruń on October 19, 1939. He was imprisoned in Fort VII, one of occupied Poland’s infamous places of detention. His deportation to the Stutthof concentration camp followed in January 1940. There, and later in quarries near Skarszewy, he was forced to carry out heavy labor. As time went on, he was also detained in the Sachsenhausen, the Oranienburg, and finally the Dachau concentration camp. In Sachsenhausen he was registered as inmate number 20946, in Dachau as 22801. According to camp records, he was subjected to malaria experiments starting in December 1942.
Liberation and fresh start after 1945
The U.S. Army liberated the Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1945. Bigus was registered as a Displaced Person (DP) and initially lived in several DP camps, including one in Ulm. He returned to Poland on May 28, 1946.
In 1963, the International Committee of the Red Cross lodged [JR1] an inquiry with the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Arolsen to learn more about persons who had been subjected to medical experiments. The ITS had documents to this effect in its archives and in 1967 officially confirmed the experiments carried out on many people, including Bigus.
After his return, the priest took over the parish in Matarnia, now a district of Gdańsk. He administered this office until his retirement in 1983. Father Józef Bigus died in 1996 at the age of eighty-eight.
A letter to the ITS
Among the documents in the Arolsen Archives, there is a letter written in 1946 by Bigus himself:
I kindly request that you send me a statement confirming my stay in Dachau, as I have not received one to date. I was sent from Sachsenhausen to Dachau on December 14, 1940. My number in Dachau was 22801.
Józef Bigus
An exhibition brings the story back
In 2025, the Arolsen Archives opened a #StolenMemory exhibition at the Kashubian Museum in Kartuzy. There, outreach manager Anna Meier-Osiński met with Andrzej and Tadeusz Bigus, the nephews of Józef Bigus, and presented them with copies of the archival records.
The family had not been aware of these documents’ existence. It was a lecture by the museum’s director Barbara Kąkol about the work carried out by Arolsen Archives that had prompted them to search for information. “He was a person with a big heart,” Kąkol says of the priest.
Memories that keep the story of Józef Bigus alive
The family memories fill the matter-of-fact archival documents with life. Józef Bigus’s nephews describe him as a warm-hearted, energetic person:
“When he visited us at the farm, he changed clothes after mass, chopped wood, worked in the garden, or pruned the fruit trees in the spring,” Tadeusz Bigus recalls.
Museum director Kąkol describes Józef Bigus’s sermons as very powerful and says:
“He was modest and never talked about himself. It was always others who were at the center of attention.”
The memory of Józef Bigus lives on: today elementary school no. 1 in Banino bears his name.