Johannes Neuhäusler (27.1.1888 Eisenhofen/Dachau -14.12.1973 Munich)

Neuhäusler, who came from a farming family and was consecrated as a priest in 1913, became a cathedral chapter member in Munich in 1932. As a colleague of Archbishop Michael von Faulhaber, he was appointed by him as an ecclesiastical policy consultant in the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising in 1933, being tasked with documenting Nazi attacks on the Catholic Church and taking action against these. His protests brought him to the attention of the Gestapo early on and he was briefly arrested in 1934. He was arrested again in 1941 and transferred to Dachau via Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, where he was held as a 'special inmate' along with other clergymen until the end of April 1945.

In 1946, he published a documentary entitled Kreuz und Hakenkreuz (Cross and Swastika) on the Catholic Church's stance during the Third Reich, in which he portrayed the institution of the Church as a resistance organization and victim of Nazi persecution and rejected any criticism of its behavior. At the same time, Neuhäusler, appointed suffragan bishop in 1947, asked the occupation authorities for leniency for alleged and convicted war criminals and Nazi offenders. Together with other Church representatives of both denominations, he founded the 'Committee for Church Prisoner Aid' in the Archbishop's Ordinariate in Munich on November 26, 1949, which, on the initiative of the defense attorney for Nazi perpetrators Rudolf Aschenauer, and with the cooperation of former NS functionaries, advocated the appeal of Allies' court rulings. Neuhäusler also played a leading role in the association 'Stille Hilfe für POWs und Internierte' (Silent Assistance for Prisoners of War and Interned Persons), which was founded at the Kolpinghaus in Munich for the same purpose in 1951. It was only after the last convicted individuals had been released from Landsberg at the end of the 1950s that the churches withdrew from 'Silent Assistance.' Neuhäusler, however, continued to stand up for prominent Nazi offenders, such as the high-ranking SS officerKarl Wolff. And yet the clergyman was also one of the pioneers for the establishment of the Dachau Concentration Camp memorial. Inaugurated in 1960, 'Christ's Agony Chapel' on the grounds of the former concentration camp was his idea.