Jean Daligault was born in Caen in 1899 and became a Catholic priest and artist. After the German occupation of France, he joined the Résistance and was arrested in Villerville on 31 August 1941. As a Nacht und Nebel prisoner, he was held in several Nazi prisons and camps, including Hinzert, Trier and Wittlich. Despite torture and deprivation, he secretly made drawings and sculptures documenting camp life and abuse. Some works survived through fellow prisoners. Shortly before Dachau’s liberation, Daligault died there in March or April 1945; the exact circumstances remain unclear.
Karl-Heinz Scheurer, born in Koblenz in 1916, grew up in a troubled family and spent much of his youth in institutions. First labelled “problematic” at age 14, he was arrested in 1937. Under Nazi criminal justice, people like Scheurer were judged not by their actual acts but by stigmatizing categories such as “asocial” or “congenitally feeble-minded.” In 1938 he was sent to Wittlich prison, whose “criminal-biological” unit helped push him into a fatal cycle of persecution. He was forcibly sterilized and transferred through institutions including Düren and Waldheim, where he was murdered in the Nazi “euthanasia” programme on 16 April 1941.
