Franz Stock occupation Catholic priest
World War II
A few days before the outbreak of World War II on  1 September 1939, he returned to Germany, where he officiated as a priest in Dortmund-Bodelschwingh and in Klein-Wanzleben in central Germany. On 13 August 1940, he was named as priest for Germans residing in Paris during Nazi Germany's occupation of France, and returned in October 1940 to Paris. In 1941, he started to work as a chaplain in the Fresnes Prison, La Santé Prison and Cherche-Midi Prison in Paris. He was also a chaplain at the execution site at the Mont Valérien during the German occupation of France in World War II, owing him his nickname L'Aumônier de l'Enfer (The chaplain of Hell) and L'archange des prisons (The archangel of the prisons). Often, because of his German nationality, he was the only priest who could freely visit the prisoners without being a part of the Nazi war apparatus. He then met with more than 2,000 prisoners, including the French Navy officer Henri Honoré d'Estienne d'Orves, the Communist Gabriel Péri and the Gaullist Edmond Michelet. As part of his pastoral mission, and with great peril to his life, he passed messages from the prisoners to their families and back, sometimes memorizing them. Exploiting every possible avenue to help the prisoners, he delivered German information on them to their families, so as to prepare them when interrogated. The information thus delivered prevented many arrests. This he did under a double threat to his life: besides the obvious peril of arrest, incarceration and/or execution if discovered, Stock suffered severe heart disease (a fact he kept from others) and thus had been ordered to rest. Nevertheless, he went on in his endeavor.
On 10 June 1941, he was officially acknowledged as military chaplain with the rank of non-commissioned officer. At the time of the liberation of Paris on 25 August 1944, Stock was in the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, where more than 600 wounded German soldiers together with 200 British and American soldiers were lying, unfit for transport. When the Americans took command of the hospital, Stock became a prisoner of war of the Americans, and was sent to the POW camp of Cherbourg. This he accepted willingly, for it enabled him to help those who now needed most his services – the defeated German POWs. The Aumônerie Générale in Paris, planning to set up a seminary for captured German Catholic students of theology at the POW Camp Depot 51 at Orléans, contacted him.  Shortly thereafter, Stock was asked to head this seminary as managing director, supported in particular by the Gaullist Edmond Michelet.On 24 April 1945, the Abbé Le Meur accompanied him to Orléans, where already twenty-eight theology students awaited them. On 17 August 1945, the "barbed-wire seminary", the séminaire des barbelés, was transferred from Orléans to Camp 501 at Le Coudray, near Chartres. On 19 August 1945, Raoul-Octove-Marie-Jean Harscouët, Bishop of Chartres, accompanied by his secretary Abbé Pierre André, visited the POW seminary. Later, he visited the camp repeatedly and addressed the seminarians, always calling them "Mes chers enfants (My dear children). On 18 September 1945, Nuncio Roncalli (future Pope John XXIII), came for a longer visit at the camp and returned on 16 July 1946, declaring:
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