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The fallen resistance people in Limburg
Petrus („Piet“) Johannes Cornelis Muhren was not a resistance fighter in the Dutch province of Limburg, but was in close contact with them and therefore also appears on this list. His German ancestors still wrote "Mühren", but in Dutch it is pronounced the same way.He entered the novitiate of the Dutch Cistercian Abbey of Mariënkroon in 1929 as Brother Canisius, but in 1933 he moved to the short-staffed Abbey of Val-Dieu in Aubel, Belgium, just over the border of Dutch South Limburg. There he received the monastic name Stephen (French: Étienne). He was ordained a priest in Val-Dieu on July 5, 1936. He was cantor for the next years and taught ecclesiastical law, dogmatics and philosophy at the internal teaching institution. When the Wehrmacht invaded in 1940, he initially fled to the west, distrusting his German abbot, but then returned and joined the Resistance with his confrere Hugo Jacobs. Through the general practitioner Jules Goffin, they came into contact with the intelligence and resistance network Clarence and the Erkens group. He observed the transports of the German army on the railroad lines in the area on extended bicycle tours and explained these tours with visits to women in need of pastoral help, which earned him the nickname Père Amoureux.
Val-Dieu and Voeren are located in the middle of the Liège-Maastricht-Aachen three-country triangle and were therefore virtually predestined as a hub for escape networks. Apart from monitoring German railroad activity, the two monks also hid fugitives in the monastery and on the surrounding farms of the border area. They were sustained discreetely by their German abbot Alberich Steiger, who, among other things, dined with high German officers. He and his confrere, together with Pol Nolens, vicar at Charneux, edited an illegal newspaper, reproduced with a spirit duplicator at Charneux, denouncing the misdeeds of National Socialism in the three Belgian languages (La Tribune Libre in French, Het Vrije Woord in Dutch, and Das Freie Wort in German).
On March 18, 1943, one day before Fr. Hugo, he was arrested by the Geheime Feldpolizei (Secret Police of the German army) as a result of the Hannibal Game. On August 11, 1943, he and ten others were sentenced to death by a court-martial in Utrecht for espionage and favoring the enemy. They were shot at Fort Rijnauwen near Utrecht (Netherlands) on October 9, 1943. On the way to the execution site, he and his confrere wore their white Cistercian monk’s robes and loudly sang a religious hymn. His body was cremated, and the ashes were later buried in the Val-Dieu monastery cemetery. A memorial plaque commemorates him in Fort Rijnauwen and in the abbey church of Val-Dieu.