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Who really said it

If there is a God, he will have to beg my forgiveness

An unknown prisoner at Mauthausen — reported, not photographed Unknown Mauthausen concentration camp, Austria · author never identified
Attributed Rights unconfirmed

The words are reported to have been scratched into a wall at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, in German: ‘Wenn es einen Gott gibt muß er mich um Verzeihung bitten.’ The report is old and repeated in serious places, but it is a report: the inscription is not on the wall today, no photograph of it has been located, and the person who cut it has never been identified. We rate this attributed — more than a rumour, less than a document.

Last verified 21 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Unconfirmed quote & credit

“If there is a God, he will have to beg my forgiveness” Anonymous inscription reported from a wall at Mauthausen concentration camp; German: 'Wenn es einen Gott gibt muß er mich um Verzeihung bitten.' Author unknown.

Can you use it?

We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.

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In context

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Provenance

The source

Reported location
A wall at Mauthausen concentration camp, Austria
Language
German — the English is a translation
Period
The camp operated 1938–1945; no date for the inscription is recorded
Physical evidence
None located — no photograph, no surviving cut

Wenn es einen Gott gibt muß er mich um Verzeihung bitten. Mauthausen, in German

The German as it is usually given. The English rendering most people know — ‘he will have to beg my forgiveness’ — is a translation of this, and a slightly sharper one than the German requires: um Verzeihung bitten is simply ‘to ask forgiveness.’

International Social Science Review 90:2 (2015)

How we traced it

  • The most substantial account we could find runs back to Joseph E. Drexel (1896–1976), a German newspaper publisher and member of the Ernst Niekisch resistance circle who was sent to Mauthausen marked Rückkehr unerwünscht — return not desired. He wrote up what he had seen in the summer of 1945; the account was privately printed in 1961 and published as Rückkehr unerwünscht (Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1978), edited by Wilhelm Raimund Beyer. Secondary writers cite him as having seen these words cut into a cell wall. We were not able to inspect that book, so we give no page number and do not present the citation as confirmed on Drexel ↗.
  • The inscription is quoted in the peer-reviewed literature — Jennifer Lassley, ‘A Defective Covenant: Abandonment of Faith among Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust,’ International Social Science Review 90:2 (2015) — which places it on the prison-cell walls at Mauthausen and states plainly that the authorship is unknown the article ↗.
  • It also circulates steadily in German public writing, where it is treated as a prisoner’s inscription at Mauthausen without further citation — for instance in a column by the German journalist Heribert Prantl, which locates it on a barrack wall and offers no source beyond that the column ↗.
  • What we could not establish: any photograph, any camp-archive catalogue number, any surviving cut in the stone, or a first-hand witness we could read directly. The commonly repeated explanation — that the marks were visible until the walls were re-plastered when the site was prepared for visitors — is itself an unsourced claim, and we do not repeat it as fact.

We deliberately state no rights status. The words are an anonymous inscription made under Nazi imprisonment by a person who has never been identified and who in all likelihood did not survive; there is no author, no publisher and no estate to point to, and an anonymous work of that period has no clean term to quote. The modern books and articles that carry the line are separately in copyright as texts, but the sentence itself is not theirs. Quote it as what it is — a prisoner’s words, reported — and say so. This is not legal advice.

Fact-check

What travels with it, and what to correct

Nobody is trying to steal this line — there is no famous name to steal it for. The errors are of a different kind: the camp gets swapped, the wording drifts, and the reporting gets described as harder than it is.

Often given as Auschwitz wrong site

Every substantive account places the inscription at Mauthausen, in Austria. Auschwitz is the version that spreads on social media, presumably because it is the camp everyone can name. If you repeat this line, name Mauthausen.

‘If God exists…’ and other variants translation drift

The German is one sentence; the English is not fixed. You will see ‘If God exists, he will have to beg my forgiveness,’ ‘he must ask me for forgiveness,’ and ‘he’d better apologise.’ All are renderings of the same German, and none of them is the original wording, because the original wording is German.

Described as if photographed overstated

The line is regularly posted alongside claims that the carving is preserved, or shown with a photograph of some other wall. We could locate no photograph of this inscription and no archive record of it. What exists is testimony that someone saw it.

‘A Jewish prisoner’ not established

Very widely stated, including in the version of the question that brought us here. It is plausible — Mauthausen held thousands of Jewish prisoners — but we found no source that identifies the writer’s name, nationality or religion. The one named prisoner in the chain of reporting, Joseph Drexel, was a German Catholic political prisoner who says he saw the words, not that he wrote them.

An anonymous prisoner’s inscription, reported from Mauthausen and quoted in the scholarly literature, where the authorship is stated to be unknown. The report is documented; the wall is not the article ↗.

Context

Why it resonates

It reverses the direction of a very old sentence. Prisoners were expected to ask forgiveness; the theology of suffering asks the sufferer to submit. This turns the whole arrangement round and hands the accusation back, and it does it in eleven words, with a knife, on a wall.

It is also not quite atheism. ‘If there is a God’ leaves the question open — the writer is not denying that anyone is listening, but setting a condition on what listening would now mean. That is a much harder thing to say than simply saying there is no God, which may be why the line has outlived the wall it was cut into.

The report is documented. The wall is not. Those are different things, and the difference matters here.

What we can and cannot show

Documented: the inscription is quoted in peer-reviewed scholarship on faith after the Holocaust, located at Mauthausen, with authorship stated as unknown.

Documented: a German form of the sentence circulates consistently — ‘Wenn es einen Gott gibt muß er mich um Verzeihung bitten’ — which is what you would expect of a real inscription rather than an English-language invention.

Reported but unverified by us: that the German publisher and Mauthausen prisoner Joseph E. Drexel recorded seeing the words on a cell wall, in an account written in 1945 and published in 1978.

Not established: the writer’s name, nationality or religion; the date of the inscription; its exact location within the camp.

Not located: any photograph, any camp-archive catalogue number, any surviving physical trace.

We have set this to 'attributed' rather than 'verified' on that basis. If a reader can point us to a photograph or an archive reference, we will change it.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Doubt Mortality

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

A Defective Covenant (International Social Science Review, 2015)issr.ungjournals.org

Peer-reviewed article that quotes the inscription and states the authorship is unknown.
Mauthausen Memorialmauthausen-memorial.org

The official memorial and archive at the site itself — the place to direct a serious enquiry about camp inscriptions.
Mauthausen concentration campen.wikipedia.org

Background on the camp, its quarry and its prisoners — context for who might have written this.
Joseph E. Drexelde.wikipedia.org

The Mauthausen prisoner whose published account is cited as the earliest report of the inscription.

The author

About the person who wrote it

An unknown prisoner at Mauthausen

Mauthausen concentration camp, Austria · identity unknown

Nothing is known about the writer. Mauthausen held political prisoners, Jews, Roma, Republican Spaniards, Soviet prisoners of war and many others; roughly 90,000 people died there. The sentence is in German, which narrows very little — German was the language of the camp, and prisoners from across Europe wrote in it. It is often said online that the writer was a Jewish prisoner. That may be true; we have found nothing that establishes it, and we would rather leave the person unlabelled than invent an identity for them.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Anonymous inscription reported from a wall at Mauthausen concentration camp, Austria. German: ‘Wenn es einen Gott gibt muß er mich um Verzeihung bitten.’ Quoted in Jennifer Lassley, ‘A Defective Covenant,’ International Social Science Review 90:2 (2015).

MLA (9th ed.)

“Wenn es einen Gott gibt muß er mich um Verzeihung bitten.” Anonymous inscription reported from Mauthausen concentration camp.

APA (7th ed.)

Anonymous. Inscription reported from Mauthausen concentration camp [attributed]. Quoted in Lassley, J. (2015). International Social Science Review, 90(2).

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘If there is a God, he will have to beg my forgiveness’?” Last verified 21 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/if-there-is-a-god-he-will-have-to-beg-my-forgiveness

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