At the age of 17, Hans Adlhoch joined the Christian lumber workers federation and from 1919 on headed the secretariat of the Catholic labor union movement in Augsburg. In 1925 he became vice president of the Catholic Congress in Stuttgart (photo). The Gestapo arrested Hans Adlhoch for the first time in 1933 because he consistently spoke out against the National Socialists. He was repeatedly imprisoned and abused in the years that followed. Despite this treatment, he consistently sought to maintain the autonomy of the Catholic labor movement. Adlhoch was sent to the Dachau concentration camp following the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944. Severely ill, Adlhoch was in no condition to endure the extreme hardships of the death march of the Dachau inmates in late April 1945. Adlhoch survived the liberation of the column of inmates by American troops in Bad Tölz only to die in a field hospital on May 21, 1945, as a result of his incarceration.