LITTLE KNOWN RESISTANCE FIGHTER
FR. KRISTIAAN HUBERTUS MUERMANS, SCJ

"Responding to a call rooted in the humiliation of his homeland, he operated in several resistance groups. In May 1944 he fell into the hands of the Gestapo, who took him away forever." (Sint Unum, 1947)

The little that we know about the fate of Fr. Muermans, SCJ, a member of the Flemish province, comes from the research of Fr. Bernd Bothe, SCJ. He was born on March 9, 1909, in Hees Bilzen, Belgium. He made his first profession in 1928 and was ordained a priest in 1933 at Louvain. The following year he was teaching in our school at Tervuren and remained there for several years. At the outbreak of World War II he was called up to active military duty. He became a prisoner of war in 1941 and was released in 1943. He returned to occupied Belgium and took up his work as a teacher at both Tervuren and in Brussels.

When Fr. Muermans returned to Belgium he became active in the resistance. He was busy with the resistance press and helped many young people to go underground in order to prevent the Gestapo from arresting them and sending them off to labor camps. When the Gestapo learned of this, he was arrested right in front of his pupils' eyes! After several days incarceration in Brussels, he was successively transferred to various concentration camps: Buchenwald, Ellrich, Harzungen and Dora where he died on February 12, 1945, only a few weeks before the camp was liberated by the American army.

We now know that Fr. Muermans died near Blankenburg in one of the 40 sub-camps of the Mittlebau-Dora Concentration camp. From 1943 to 1945 Dora produced arms for the Germany Army: warplanes, antiaircraft batteries, both the V-1 and V-2 rockets. Hitler and the High Command still believed these super weapons had the potential to bring them victory. They were produced in an immense underground factory, the largest of its kind up until then. The size of this underground factory is hard to comprehend. An enormous tunnel stretched for 12.43 miles and was 98.43 feet high. Some 60,000 prisoners from the Mittlebau-Dora camps worked as slaves, 20,000 of whom died, including Fr. Muermans. The circumstances of his death remain obscure.

Fr. Muermans left us no writings. There was only his commitment to young people in the resistance which cost him his life.