St. Maksymilian Maria Kolbe (1894–1941) was first arrested by the Gestapo in 1939 for his anti-Nazism but was later released. He and the friars at City of Mary Immaculate, a Roman Catholic religious center founded by Kolbe in Poland in 1927, used the center to shelter an estimated 2,000–3,000 Polish refugees, the majority of whom were Jewish, and continued to publish anti-Nazi publications. Kolbe was again arrested in 1941 for aiding Jews and the Polish underground and was sent to Auschwitz. Following a prisoner’s escape, 10 men were randomly selected to die as punishment, and Kolbe volunteered to die in place of another prisoner. He was starved for weeks and then injected with carbolic acid before being cremated.
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