Maximilian Kolbe
Maximilian Kolbe (January 8, 1894–August 14, 1941), also known as Maksymilian or Massimiliano Maria Kolbe and Apostle of Consecration to Mary, born as Rajmund Kolbe, was a Polish Franciscan friar who volunteered to die in place of a stranger in the National Socialist concentration camp at Auschwitz in Poland.

He was canonized by the Roman Catholic Church as Saint Maximilian Kolbe on October 10, 1982 by Pope John Paul II, and declared a martyr of charity. He is the patron saint of drug addicts, families, imprisoned people, journalists, prisoners, the pro-life movement, and amateur radio.

Biography
Kolbe was born, to a family of German origin, in 1894 in Zdunska Wola, at that time part of Russia, as the second son of Juliusz Kolbe and Marianna Kolbe (née Dabrowska). His parents moved to Pabianice, where they worked first as weavers, then ran a bookstore. Later, in 1914, his father joined Józef Pilsudski's Polish Legions and was captured and executed by the Russians for fighting for the independence of a partitioned Poland.

In 1907, Kolbe and his elder brother Franciszek decided to join the Franciscan order. They illegally crossed the border between Russia and Austria-Hungary and joined the Franciscan junior seminary in Lwów. In 1910, Kolbe was allowed to enter the novitiate. He professed his first vows in 1911, adopting the name Maxsimilian, and the final vows in 1914, in Rome, adopting the names Maxsimilian Maria, to show his veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

In 1912, he was sent to Kraków, and, in the same year, to Rome, where he studied philosophy, theology, mathematics, and physics. He earned a doctorate in philosophy in 1915 at the Pontifical Gregorian University, and the doctorate in theology in 1919 at the Pontifical University of St. Bonaventure. During his time as a student, he witnessed vehement demonstrations against Popes St. Pius X and Benedict XV by the Freemasons in Rome and was inspired to organize the Militia Immaculata, or Army of Mary, to work for conversion of sinners and the enemies of the Catholic Church through the intercession of the Virgin Mary. In 1918, he was ordained a priest. In the conservative publications of the Militia Immaculatae, he particularly condemned Freemasonry, Communism, Zionism, Capitalism and Imperialism.

In 1919, he returned to the newly independent Poland, where he was very active in promoting the veneration of the Immaculate Virgin Mary, founding and supervising the monastery of Niepokalanów near Warsaw, a seminary, a radio station, and several other organizations and publications. Between 1930 and 1936, he took a series of missions to Japan, where he founded a monastery at the outskirts of Nagasaki, a Japanese paper, and a seminary.