“Please translate the biographies of the African martyrs into your national language!” Moll urged during a March 7 interview, days after sharing the list of German martyrs killed in Africa. He said that currently these biographies “are being translated into Arabic, but there are difficulties with printing.”
Moll, a historian with prior experience serving in the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith as well as the Vatican Congregation for the Causes of Saints, started compiling biographies of the German evangelists at the request of the Catholic bishops in Germany.
The November 1994 apostolic letter of Pope John Paul II on the preparation for the Jubilee of the Year 2000, Tertio Millennio Adveniente, reportedly inspired the compilation of these biographies.
In the apostolic letter, Pope John Paul II said: “At the end of the second millennium, the Church has once again become the Church of martyrs. In our century, martyrs have returned, often unknown, akin to ‘unknown soldiers’ of the great cause of God.”
The German martyrs in Africa whose profiles have been documented include Father Franz Jäger, a member of the Oblates who was killed in 1905 in South West Africa during the Herero Uprising. South West Africa was a territory under South African administration from 1915 to 1990 and became the present-day Namibia.
Others include three Dominican missionaries who lost their lives in Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) in 1977: Sisters Magdala (Christa Elisabeth) Lewandowski from Kiel, Epiphany (Berta) Schneider from Munich, and Ceslaus (Anna) Stiegler from the Upper Palatinate.