The Monastery Vyšší Brod / Hohenfurth in World War Two and its war causalties

According to the last catalogue of the Bohemian Province of the Order, issued in 1940, Vyšší Brod numbered fifty three order priests, seven order seminarians and nine lay brothers. Thus the monastic community had sixty nine members, which made it the strongest monastery in the Order in terms of numbers (at least, as far as individual monasteries are concerned), and it had the highest number of members in its almost 700-year-long history. The majority of the monastic community worked as pastors or chaplains in parishes. Twenty-one Fathers, seminarians and lay brothers were conscripted to the army in the course of the WWII. Ten of them fell on the battlefield (nine on the eastern front, one in Italy), of whom six were Fathers, three seminarians and one a lay brother.  Father Engelbert Blochl died in Dachau of starvation and maltreatment (on the All Saints’ Day 1942). In comparison, the Monastery of Osek had thirty-one members, of whom thirty were priests and one a student.