Watching a priest in Dachau being tortured was a Nazi nurse of Dutch origin whose job it was to give people lethal injections and who hated religion, especially clergy. As she observed Father Brandsma, she would sometimes mock him and religion. This prompted him to engage her in conversation, asking why she hated faith so much.
Not long before she killed him July 26, 1942, at 1:50pm, he gave her his handmade rosary. He told her to pray, and when she laughed at him, he simply told her again to pray.
Sometime in the 1950s, at a Carmelite community in Germany, an aging woman presented herself to the friars, wanting to talk. It was the nurse. She came asking forgiveness for hastening Father Brandsma’s death. Later, at Blessed Titus’ beatification in 1985, she was among the congregants.
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