At the beginning of August 1941, infantry private and devoted Catholic Hans Albring penned a letter to his friend and fellow soldier, Lt. Eugen Altrogge. Germany's massive invasion of the Soviet Union was entering its sixth week. Albring's unit, a signals section attached to Sixth Corps, had already reached the Vitebsk region in modern-day Belarus, fewer than 850 kilometers from Moscow. In a settlement along the Daugava River, he witnessed a remarkable event: a worship service in a local church, led by a German chaplain and attended by a crowd of German soldiers and Soviet civilians. The chaplain chose to preach on the story of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem and his expulsion of the merchants from the temple grounds. As Albring noted, the sermon drew a direct analogy to the present moment as German forces drove out the area's communist rulers. He observed that the civilians appeared to grasp the chaplain's meaning even across the linguistic divide. They remained reverently silent as the soldiers’ songs echoed across the river. The moment the service ended, civilian men, women, and children rushed toward the altar, overjoyed at the prospect of being able to once again worship openly after years of religious repression. “[T]he pious crowd” gave the chaplain “bread and candles and flowers,” then gathered around two icons that its members had brought with them. “We have never witnessed such a scene before,” Albring exclaimed to his friend. “I wish you could have been here!!”Footnote 1
Although this was the first event of its kind Albring himself experienced, it was not unique. In the nearby city of Vitebsk, Wehrmacht personnel reopened the Roman Catholic cathedral on the orders of Ninth Army's commanding general, who also sanctioned further church openings that military chaplains had already initiated throughout his zone of control.Footnote 2 A similar pattern took hold across the entire western Soviet Union, from the Baltic to the Black Sea: as the Wehrmacht drove forward, German chaplains and enlisted men, often with local help, went to work refurbishing churches the Soviet regime had shuttered and, with permission from their superiors, held rededication services often attended by throngs of Soviet civilians. The events evoked feelings of mutual goodwill and, to those who took part, seemed to signal that the Wehrmacht's arrival portended a new era of religious freedom.
As Albring attended the service along the Daugava, military authorities commenced with the registration of the area's Jewish population, who were required to wear a yellow star and perform forced labor. Several hundred were shot by Wehrmacht and SS Einsatzkommando 9 personnel between July and September. Survivors were forced in late July to relocate to the right bank of the Daugava, where they were restricted to two ghetto areas. As they made the crossing, German soldiers fired on their boats, killing two to three hundred. Those who did not starve to death or die of disease in the ghettos were shot during a liquidation action in early October by the Einsatzkommando. In total, roughly 7,500 Jews from Vitebsk perished at the hands of the Wehrmacht and the SS during the war, along with Roma and Sinti residents, communist officials, and all others the occupiers considered a threat.Footnote 3 German troops around Vitebsk committed widespread thefts of civilian property.Footnote 4 As Albring reported, members of his own unit summarily executed Red Army snipers still fighting behind German lines.Footnote 5 Later, in the winter of 1943–44, Vitebsk's residents were subjected to scorched earth measures as the occupiers retreated.Footnote 6
The Wehrmacht's brutal conduct in the Vitebsk region was not an isolated case. Decades of meticulous research on the part of Wehrmacht historians has established that the war in the USSR was no ordinary conflict. It is now recognized as a Vernichtungskrieg, a war of extermination aimed at destroying “Jewish Bolshevism” and securing Lebensraum for the German people, who would rule over whatever was left of the area's native population. These goals were animated by a National Socialist ideology that asserted the inferiority of Eastern Europeans and defined Jews as an existential threat to the Reich. In pursuit of Adolf Hitler's vision, the Wehrmacht deliberately tossed aside the safeguards of international law. What followed was a four-year reign of terror marked by indiscriminate violence against civilians, the execution of Soviet officials, the mass starvation of more than 3 million Red Army POWs, and complicity in the Holocaust in concert with SS personnel.Footnote 7 In order to explain the army's behavior, historians have emphasized the pervasive influence of racial ideology within its ranks, including widespread racism toward Jews and Slavs, a colonialist outlook, and a general agreement with much of the Nazi program.Footnote 8
This article analyzes the reopening of churches by German forces across the western Soviet Union in the summer and fall of 1941, by which time an order from Hitler himself put a stop to the practice. It describes how the services unfolded “on the ground,” examines the context surrounding them, and attempts to explain why they occurred at all given that they appear, at least on the surface, to contradict the army's usual pattern of ideologically inspired terror against the Soviet population. The reopening services will also be used to shed light on two larger questions. First, what role did religion play in the Wehrmacht during Operation Barbarossa, and what was its relationship to Nazi ideology within this context? Second, what can the reopenings tell us about the Wehrmacht's conduct during the early months of the invasion, especially vis-à-vis non-Jewish Soviet civilians?
To date, the reestablishment of churches in the Soviet Union has attracted little in the way of sustained scholarly inquiry. In her recent study of Catholic priests in the Wehrmacht, Lauren Faulkner Rossi briefly mentions these events, which she attributes to the deep religiosity of the Soviet people and the desire of Wehrmacht clergymen to minister to fellow Christians while striking a blow against Bolshevism.Footnote 9 Alexander Dallin's classic analysis of German occupation in the USSR largely explains the army's relatively benign church policy—including its restoration of churches—as a propaganda effort aimed at generating local goodwill.Footnote 10 Wendy Lower has offered a similar interpretation in her study of the occupation in Zhytomyr, Ukraine.Footnote 11 Karel Berkhoff has provided a fascinating look at the reopening phenomenon from the perspective of civilians in Soviet Ukraine, whom he describes as initially elated at the Wehrmacht's stance on freedom of worship.Footnote 12 Although each of these authors has provided a partial view of the reopenings, none has examined their origins and course in detail or explained how they fit into the broader history of the Eastern Front. Further, the assumption that Wehrmacht-civilian services amounted to little more than propaganda exercises is not borne out by the available evidence. As this article will illustrate, although the army did take advantage of their propaganda value, the services were for the most part spontaneous events driven by chaplains, soldiers, and civilians on the ground, usually with little active involvement from military authorities.Footnote 13
Answers to the question of religion's role in the Wehrmacht have likewise remained incomplete. Many historians have tended to view the Wehrmacht as a secular army that left behind its religious traditions, whether due to the shock of World War I, declining church attendance in Germany, or the hostility of Nazi leaders. As a result, few have seen religion as a major influence. In his systematic study of soldiers’ letters, Klaus Latzel devotes only two pages to religion and argues it played a negligible role in the Wehrmacht.Footnote 14 Stephen Fritz has similarly given only marginal attention to the subject, although he allows that “many Landsers sought comfort in religion.”Footnote 15 Hans Joachim Schröder, in his extensive study of interviews with German veterans, concludes that religion held only “minor importance” among ordinary troops.Footnote 16 One exception is Thomas Kühne, who has argued that Christians often formed their own sub-community because they sometimes struggled to be accepted into the larger circle of comrades. Still, he finds that they shared a similar outlook toward the war with the USSR and the military community with their brothers-in-arms.Footnote 17 The bulk of historical inquiry on Wehrmacht religious life has focused on a relatively tiny subset of servicemen, namely, chaplains and clergymen.Footnote 18 It is, however, difficult to generalize from their experiences to those of the millions who passed through the army's ranks.
Both scholarly and popular interpretations of the role of religion in the Wehrmacht have often centered on the issue of whether it reinforced or countervailed the Nazi agenda. In the postwar decades, West German memory of the Wehrmacht often coalesced around the image of the German soldier as a good Christian man led astray by the purveyors of an ideology in which he never truly believed, and who more than atoned for his sins.Footnote 19 A great deal has changed since these early attempts at apology and exoneration, including decades of research on the army's crimes and the growing recognition that the Nazi Party enjoyed a substantial measure of support from Christians in Germany.Footnote 20 Building on this historiography, Doris Bergen has emphasized the role of religion—above all through the presence and activity of the army's chaplains—in providing legitimation for the Nazis’ genocidal project in the East.Footnote 21 She and others have also pointed out that antisemitism and anti-Bolshevism were common features of Christian discourse in the Wehrmacht.Footnote 22 At the same time, however, historians have revealed that some of the rank-and-file who resisted or deserted were motivated in no small part by religiously grounded objections to the war or atrocities committed by the German side.Footnote 23
In contrast to the approaches previously outlined, this article aims to provide a more comprehensive account of what transpired in the early months of the invasion as German troops joined Soviet civilians to set houses of worship in order, what made these events possible in the midst of a genocidal campaign, what they meant to those who took part, and their significance in the larger context of the invasion. To do so, it examines the reopenings from a wide range of perspectives, including that of soldiers and chaplains who participated, the officer corps, propagandists, German churchmen, and Nazi leaders, while also taking account of the reaction of Soviet civilians. It will demonstrate that the reopenings were neither propaganda sideshows nor the product of a well-planned strategy. They were the spontaneous outcome of a host of interrelated factors, including the stance taken by Germany's churches, the ambiguous rhetoric of Nazi leaders, the army's Christian traditions, the missionary impulse felt by many chaplains and ordinary soldiers, the enthusiasm of Soviet residents, and the tacit approval of German officers. Most of all, the reopening services were animated by a uniquely Christian understanding of the invasion that attracted a substantial number of adherents in the Wehrmacht.
Further, this article demonstrates that religion played a far more significant role in the Wehrmacht than scholars have recognized, not only for ordained clergy but also for the men they served. Beyond strengthening communal ties, it profoundly influenced how many troops defined themselves and their enemy and how they made sense of their participation. Regarding the relationship between religion and Nazi ideology in the Wehrmacht, this article argues that religion emerged as a force with its own unique agenda, one that occupied an ambiguous space between the two poles of resistance and legitimation. The reopening services, for instance, undermined the strict racial hierarchy Nazi leaders sought to enforce but simultaneously encouraged Christian soldiers to view the invasion as a spiritual necessity.
In addition to examining how the reopenings unfolded and what they tell us about religion in the Wehrmacht, the current study sheds light on how the army operated in the early days of Operation Barbarossa, particularly how it interacted with the non-Jewish civilian population. Much of the scholarship of the last decades has—correctly—painted a damning portrait of the army's modus operandi. However, newer works by scholars such as Ben Shepherd, Christian Hartmann, and Jeff Rutherford have revealed that although terror was a ubiquitous feature of the Wehrmacht's occupation, units sometimes employed conciliatory policies.Footnote 24 Using the example of the reopenings, the present study reinforces the finding that as an institution the Wehrmacht was occasionally willing, especially during the invasion's early days, to skirt the boundaries of what ideology allowed. It did so not from humanitarian concerns but the desire to enhance its public image, “win over” Soviet civilians, and motivate Christian soldiers within its own ranks.
A wide variety of sources will be used to explore the reopenings. Letters from the Museumsstiftung Post und Telekommunikation in Berlin provide a window into the religious outlooks of Wehrmacht soldiers.Footnote 25 The writings of chaplains, both published and in archival form, illuminate the mentalities and actions of the men who were at the center of the army's religious practice, as well as the reopenings themselves. Military documents from the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, including intelligence reports, propaganda, chaplains’ reports, and a wide range of other materials have been used to provide institutional context. Further Bundesarchiv and church archive documents illustrate the role of the churches and Nazi authorities in the religious framing of the war.
This article opens with an exploration of religion in the Wehrmacht leading up to 1941. It then proceeds to discuss soldiers’ and chaplains’ reactions to the fate of religion in the USSR and their spontaneous involvement in refurbishing and reinstituting churches shut down by the Soviet regime, prompting a swift backlash from Nazi authorities. The conclusion returns to the question of what the reopenings tell us about the Wehrmacht within the context of the Vernichtungskrieg.
Religion in the Wehrmacht before 1941
The Wehrmacht that would enter the Soviet Union was an army firmly rooted in religious traditions that stretched back at least to the Thirty Years’ War. Along with mandatory worship services for soldiers, the Hohenzollern monarchy established a standing chaplaincy at the turn of the eighteenth century, ushering in a lasting alliance among throne, altar, and sword.Footnote 26 It reached its apex during World War I, when German troops marched into battle with belt buckles sporting the motto “God is with us” (Gott mit uns).Footnote 27 On the home front, Protestant and Catholic bishops declared that the nation was pursuing a divinely sanctioned cause.Footnote 28
When Hitler was appointed chancellor in 1933, he enjoyed broad-based support among Christians in Germany, particularly Protestants, a fact that owed not a little to his strong anti-Bolshevist stance. Haunted by the specter of the Russian Revolution, leaders on both sides of the confessional divide had fatefully considered communism, rather than fascism, Europe's greatest threat.Footnote 29 Although they remained distrustful of Nazi intentions, the churches accommodated themselves to the new regime in an effort to demonstrate their loyalty to the nation and safeguard their institutional integrity.Footnote 30 Cognizant of the need to maintain this support, Nazi leaders frequently gave lip service to religious values, although in fact Hitler and his entourage had little patience for a worldview they considered “soft,” too closely tied to its Jewish past, and perversely concerned with humanity as a whole rather than the German Volk.
It was no accident, then, that Nazi leaders such as Martin Bormann and Joseph Goebbels worked throughout the 1930s to limit the influence of religion in the military. Under their watchful gaze, attendance at worship was made voluntary and soldiers were allowed for the first time to identify as belonging to neither Christian confession.Footnote 31 After the war's outbreak, the distribution of religious literature was increasingly restricted by regime ministries and a compliant Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW).Footnote 32 In April 1942, Hitler decreed that no new religious writings would be permitted in the army.Footnote 33 By another special order of the Führer, Jesuits were expelled from active duty in the spring of 1941.Footnote 34
In cases where Nazi leaders and sympathetic officers were not able to fully dismantle the army's religious traditions, they frequently tried to co-opt them for their own purposes. New regulations for the chaplaincy—now reduced to fewer than one thousand membersFootnote 35—emphasized the chaplain's role in strengthening the army's fighting spirit rather than offering spiritual care.Footnote 36 Partly as a result of Gestapo screening, a sizeable number of chaplains adhered to the “German Christian” movement, a new Protestant denomination initially promoted by Nazi officials that combatted Jewish theological influences and embraced a hyper-masculine “positive Christianity.”Footnote 37 Prayers for Hitler now appeared in the army's official Protestant and Catholic songbooks alongside nationalistic and religious hymns stripped of Jewish references.Footnote 38
In spite of Nazi interference, however, the army still retained strong ties to its spiritual roots. Many officers remained supportive of Christianity, whether out of personal religious faith or the belief that spiritual care lifted morale.Footnote 39 Uniformed clergy still fulfilled their traditional religious functions, such as conducting worship services and funerals. Throughout the war, they consistently reported that both officers and men supported their work.Footnote 40 Despite the prohibition on religious literature, army publications continued to employ religious language.Footnote 41
Just as the Wehrmacht preserved many of its religious structures at the institutional level, so too the soldiers in the ranks retained strong religious ties. They hailed from a nation where, despite declining church attendance, roughly 95 percent of the population identified as either Catholic or Protestant, and all had come of age in a culture deeply influenced by Christian traditions.Footnote 42 Chaplains recorded high worship attendance and were often overwhelmed by calls for more services and religious care by the men they served.Footnote 43
Religious outlooks among Wehrmacht soldiers came in innumerable gradations. A large contingent may be regarded as cultural Christians for whom religion held limited personal resonance. Others maintained a stronger link to their faith and to church institutions. As in times past, Christianity, particularly Protestantism, remained tightly bound up with nationalist sentiment. Some Christian soldiers displayed concern about Nazism's anti-church directions, but the vast majority considered themselves loyal followers of the Führer and, like churchgoers at home, did not necessarily view Nazism and Christianity as incompatible.
Among the more committed Christian soldiers in the Wehrmacht was Franz Siebeler, a Catholic from the Thuringian city of Nordhausen. A former bank clerk and now artilleryman in the 14th Panzer Division, Siebeler sought out worship opportunities wherever he could find them. He was also a staunch nationalist with antisemitic leanings who spoke of protecting “our beautiful Germany” from the “Asian hordes” and offered up prayers for the Führer in his letters.Footnote 44 In contrast, Hans Albring, an intellectually minded Catholic from the Rhineland with a strong interest in theology, was less attached to nationalist sentiments. Like Siebeler, he actively took advantage of worship opportunities and cultivated friendships with fellow Christian soldiers, but in time he came to seriously question the ideology of Germany's leadership.
Former accountant Walter Neuser exemplifies the attitude of those soldiers who may be termed cultural Protestants. He grew up in a Protestant household and later joined the NSDAP.Footnote 45 During his time as a noncommissioned officer with an artillery regiment, he attended a handful of worship services, celebrated Christian holidays, and from time to time called on God's aid, but otherwise had little to say of religious matters. Feldwebel Konrad Jarausch, who had recently turned forty when the invasion started, belonged to an older generation of Protestants with stronger ties to their faith traditions.Footnote 46 The son of a middle-class Protestant family in Berlin, Jarausch had studied history, with a theology minor, and received his PhD in 1925. He went on to teach secondary school in Brandenburg and published on questions of theological pedagogy. Having rejected both liberalism and communism, Jarausch yearned for an organic national revival and enjoyed the comradeship of the military community after being drafted in 1939. However, he ultimately valued faith above nation and expressed discomfort at the militarization of religion he witnessed in the Wehrmacht.Footnote 47
Many of the army's highest officers viewed religion largely as a means to enhance the troops’ fighting spirit. They were not necessarily wrong—many soldiers and chaplains reported feeling more prepared for combat on account of their faith—but religion played several other important roles within the Wehrmacht. Chief among them was the cementing of communal bonds. Attendance at worship services, songs and prayers, and participation in the sacraments added a further layer of intimacy to the ties of comradeship through the experience of shared ritual. Through small Bible study circles, private conversations, and visits by army clergy, Christian soldiers forged lasting friendships and, in some cases, their own subcommunity. Christian holidays such as Christmas and Easter became occasions for the men on the front to celebrate a shared national, cultural, and religious identity and re-create patterns of life they associated with home and family.Footnote 48
Franz Siebeler, for instance, attended worship services whenever he could and described to his parents and siblings the eclectic mix of officers, enlisted men, and Red Cross personnel who flocked to them in large numbers.Footnote 49 He was especially grateful for the chance to attend worship on Christmas, Easter, and Mother's Day, where he sang holiday songs with his comrades and noted when his unit's officers made an appearance.Footnote 50 For Siebeler and many other Christian soldiers, religion served as a bridge to the homeland as well. He often asked his family for prayers, inquired about recent developments in their local faith community, and expressed appreciation for the correspondence he received from a cleric at the Nordhausen cathedral.Footnote 51
As Wehrmacht personnel attempted to maintain the centuries-old association between “Bible and sword” in the face of Nazi opposition, the German invasion of Poland in 1939 brought with it a new set of religious questions, including how the German churches would react to the outbreak of war and what religious policies the Wehrmacht would follow in foreign lands. The first question was answered quickly, when both major German denominations pledged support for the war effort in characteristically nationalist terms.Footnote 52 The second question proved more complex. Instructions handed down on the eve of the campaign made clear that the army's chaplains were to confine their ministry to German military personnel. Bowing to practicality, however, the High Command (OKH) approved the use of local churches for Wehrmacht worship services.Footnote 53 Konrad Jarausch reported attending several such services in Protestant and Catholic churches, sometimes together with ethnic Germans.Footnote 54 If any joint services between German soldiers and ethnic Poles took place, however, they would have been few and far between. As Jarausch noted, military authorities issued a series of strict orders against associating with Poles.Footnote 55 Further, rumors swirled in the Wehrmacht regarding alleged Polish atrocities against ethnic Germans.Footnote 56 This charge fed on the nationalist tensions that had characterized the German-Polish relationship during the 1930s.Footnote 57
Although they did permit the use of local churches for German army services, Wehrmacht leaders sometimes intervened when they worried that doing so would engender Polish resistance.Footnote 58 In the same vein, Franz Justus Rarkowski, the “field bishop” who headed the Catholic chaplaincy, reminded his subordinates in a strongly worded letter that they were under orders to avoid all contact with local clergy and to refrain from providing the population with religious care, citing the possibility for enemy espionage.Footnote 59 He explained that exceptions could be made in emergencies and with the approval of superior officers, a caveat that would provide chaplains room to maneuver in the Soviet Union but did not seem to apply in Poland, where despite persecution local church hierarchies remained relatively intact and able to provide religious care for the local population.Footnote 60 In at least a few cases, Catholic chaplains and priest-soldiers defied orders by associating with their Polish counterparts.Footnote 61 Any resulting goodwill, however, was overshadowed by the Wehrmacht's active participation in a premeditated campaign of terror carried out by the occupiers against Jews, local elites, and any individuals considered a potential threat to German rule. The victims included thousands of Polish priests and members of Catholic orders whom the occupiers singled out because of their close association with Polish national identity.Footnote 62
In the West, the Wehrmacht proved much more accommodating when it came to religious contact with civilians. This was likely due to the categorization of Western Europeans as culturally and racially nearer to the Germans in the Nazi worldview, as well as to the institutional memory of World War I, when German personnel worshipped side-by-side with French and Belgian civilians on a frequent basis.Footnote 63 As in Poland, German chaplains held services in churches across France and the Low Countries for members of their own armed forces.Footnote 64 But in a major departure from the Polish case, religious contact between Wehrmacht personnel and Western civilians became a common feature of the occupation.
This contact always depended upon the goodwill of the local commanding officer. Some forbade their men from attending worship alongside civilians.Footnote 65 Others set more lenient policies. When Catholic Ernst Weidner, who had been recently named to the chaplaincy, asked his superior if he could conduct Mass in the company of the local French community, he was told, “The important thing is you're back by the time work starts.” The French priest welcomed his presence, and from then on he “celebrated Holy Mass almost every morning with the French in Lille.”Footnote 66 In the Rouen cathedral, Private Hans Albring attended a memorable High Mass led by a French archbishop.Footnote 67 In Holland, Protestant cannoneer Hans Simon read the Bible with the Dutch family in whose home he quartered and wrote that he and his comrades engaged the locals in theological conversations.Footnote 68 German servicemen often compared their side's level of religious devotion favorably with that of foreign civilians, heightening the conviction that the Wehrmacht was an exemplary “Christian” army.Footnote 69
Prelude to the Reopening Services
By the spring of 1941, many of the officers and men who had taken part in the invasion of the West now found themselves poised along the Soviet border. Their fresh experiences worshipping in French cathedrals and drawing approving remarks from local residents had altered expectations since their time in Poland and lowered inhibitions toward religious contact. Officers had become accustomed to looking the other way. Despite the ever-present fear of “fraternization with the enemy,” a measure of Christian universalism had begun to seep into the army's modus operandi.
Recent experiences in the West were one of many factors that shaped the religious attitudes and expectations of Wehrmacht personnel during the USSR invasion. The anti-communist stance of the churches was another. For over two decades, German pastors and priests had denounced the USSR as the single greatest threat to the future of European Christianity, a godless land where materialism had replaced respect for the divine—an image German soldiers had absorbed since childhood. Although Hitler's latest gamble was broadly unpopular among the German public, the churches supported the campaign wholeheartedly.Footnote 70 When the news struck, the leaders of the largest Protestant denomination thanked the Führer for “calling our people and the peoples of Europe to the decisive confrontation with the mortal enemy of all order and all western Christianity …”Footnote 71 Catholic officials took a similar stance. Defeating the USSR, members of both churches believed, would remove the communist threat to Europe, revitalize Christianity in Germany, and, perhaps, return the Soviet Union—its people, if not its leaders—to the fold from which it had strayed.Footnote 72
The notion that the conflict represented an epic showdown between atheism and Christian civilization also found an unlikely outlet in the messaging of the Nazi regime itself. In order to mobilize Christian support for the war, Nazi officials settled on the characteristically cynical policy of appropriating religious rhetoric while continuing to undermine Christianity in the Wehrmacht in practice. Cognizant of the churches’ anti-communist stance, Goebbels presented the invasion as “Europe's crusade against Bolshevism” in his propaganda efforts.Footnote 73 Hitler himself chose a code name for the operation—Barbarossa—that recalled one of German history's most famous crusader-kings. He laced his notices to troops and wartime speeches with appeals for divine aid.Footnote 74 In a 1942 public address, the Führer even directly referred to the war as a “European crusade.”Footnote 75 It is quite clear that Nazi leaders viewed this “crusade” in exclusively ideological terms.Footnote 76 By giving lip service to a vaguely defined notion of spiritual conflict, however, regime officials helped secure the support of committed Christians, as well as potential recruits across the continent.Footnote 77 The crusade theme was faithfully disseminated through the ranks by army propagandists.Footnote 78
As German troops advanced into the endless expanse of the Soviet Union, whether inspired by the Nazis’ pseudo-religious rhetoric, the anti-communist stance of the churches, their own personal backgrounds, or simply out of sheer curiosity, they took an active interest in the fate of religious life in what they had been told was the heartland of European atheism. Konrad Jarausch commented to his wife in August that he kept his “eyes open for signs of churches and crucifixes” as he traveled to the POW camp where he would serve as a kitchen supervisor.Footnote 79 He and his fellow men in uniform quickly discovered that houses of worship remained a ubiquitous feature of the Soviet landscape. “Here in the village stands a fabulous church building.… The ornaments and pictures are really marvelous,” wrote Walter Neuser to his mother during a break in the fighting.Footnote 80
When time permitted, curious soldiers took it upon themselves to investigate these churches more closely. What they found elicited shock and horror. En route to Kiev, Franz Siebeler lamented to his family that in the town he was passing through, the church “was closed over ten years ago, altar and images were ripped out and the house of worship was used as a granary. It looks sad!”Footnote 81 The letters of his fellow troops echoed his observations. Walter Neuser encountered a church near a small village in mid-July as his artillery regiment neared Smolensk. “It looked terrible inside,” he told his mother. “It had been used as a warehouse.”Footnote 82 Konrad Jarausch noticed that one of the churches he investigated in Minsk lacked all Christian symbols and instead sported a ticket window. A halting conversation with local residents quickly solved the mystery: the Soviets had turned the building into a cinema.Footnote 83 For men like Jarausch, such discoveries reinforced the preconception that they were members of a spiritually healthy nation entering a land in the grip of a godless ideology.
As the rank-and-file reacted with horror to the fate of local houses of worship, accounts of these latest revelations flooded the Wehrmacht press. The embedded journalists of the Propaganda Kompanien (PK) highlighted one case after another of churches the Soviet regime had destroyed or converted to all manner of profane uses, including as stables, theaters, and “museums of atheism.”Footnote 84 A newspaper for Wehrmacht personnel described how in one city, “the Bolsheviks … defiled 32 churches and desecrated many cemeteries. A dance floor was even erected on the site of one cemetery.”Footnote 85 Other reports drew attention to the fate of the USSR's Christian clergy, many of whom had been imprisoned or executed.Footnote 86 Although the bulk of the army's press coverage described these revelations as the natural outgrowth of materialism and lack of respect for culture, at least a few PK journalists linked the Soviets’ anti-Christian policies to the supposedly “Jewish” character of the regime.Footnote 87
Back in the German homeland, newspapers conveyed chilling tales of Soviet sacrilege. Reporters for the Frankfurter Zeitung detailed their visit to a church that had been converted to a factory in a Ukrainian city, a sight that “sad[dened] and disturbed” them.Footnote 88 In what would become a major theme of the Propaganda Ministry's anti-Bolshevik campaigns, Germany's military and civilian journalists directed their ire against the Western Allies for supporting such an irreverent regime.Footnote 89 One characteristic army cartoon depicted a smiling Archbishop of Canterbury placing a halo on the head of an axe-wielding Stalin.Footnote 90 Reports like these instilled a sense of righteous anger among Christian soldiers and served as moral leverage against the Soviet Union and its allies.
None of the men who populated the Wehrmacht's ranks were more disturbed at these revelations than the chaplains. Although they did not always see eye to eye with the Nazi regime, the army's uniformed clerics encouraged the troops to view Bolshevism as a satanic force that had to be destroyed at all costs. Catholic chaplaincy head Franz Justus Rarkowski proclaimed in a pastoral message that the invasion constituted a “European crusade” against a “demonic regime of barbarism” that threatened humanity itself.Footnote 91 In mid-August, the Protestant chaplain of 18th Infantry Division delivered a fiery sermon in which he excoriated the Bolsheviks as the antithesis of all that was good and holy. Barbarossa, he declared, represented “the decisive battle between a worldview severed from God and God-despising, and one connected with God that knows itself to be duty-bound to God.”Footnote 92
As chaplains and soldiers advanced deeper into Soviet territory, however, a new discovery complicated this black-and-white image of spiritual conflict. In their interactions with the population—whether these took the form of violent thefts, trading, or quartering in local houses—the invaders were amazed to find that although the churches were in a state of neglect, few of the people they encountered bore much resemblance to the stereotypical “godless communists” they had been told to expect. What they found instead were tangible signs that large segments of the population still held firmly to their Christian roots. “Almost in every house you seen icons in the corner of the room decorated with flowers and surrounded by a fine cloth with wonderful embroidery,” Hans Albring observed to his friend Eugen.Footnote 93 On the northern sector of the front, Hans Simon noted, “In the vanguard, I often saw women praying [and] crossing themselves, who kissed their cross[es] that they wear around their necks like Uncle Ernst does.”Footnote 94 Like other German soldiers, he also wrote of the “God corners”—small shrines—that could be found in every local house.Footnote 95 Although few had anticipated this revelation, chaplains and troops greeted the persistence of Soviet religiosity as a positive development. “That Bolshevism is only the matter of a few can be seen in every farmhouse,” wrote Franz Siebeler. “There still hang in the corner everywhere holy images after the fashion of the famous Russian icon. Faith still sits deep in the heart.”Footnote 96 This recognition of the persistence of religious belief in the Soviet Union prompted Christian soldiers to reassess their views and recognize a measure of spiritual kinship with its population.
The devoutness of ordinary Soviet citizens did not escape the notice of army propagandists. PK reporter Bernd Poiess wrote of the mysterious religiosity of “holy Russia,” whose people still possessed a “childlike trust in God” and had secretly awaited the day of religious revival. “Now since the Germans have come,” he wrote, “they dig out their icons and holy implements and … set them up in their rooms.”Footnote 97 Wehrmacht intelligence officials concluded from their investigations of the mood of the population that many Soviet citizens remained strongly attached to religion, particularly in the countryside.Footnote 98 “Here,” suggested a prescient Second Army intelligence report, “propaganda has a rich field to work in.”Footnote 99
The twin discoveries of desecrated churches and the persistent religiosity of Soviet civilians not only gave rise to the pragmatic impulse on the part of Wehrmacht officers to exploit this “rich field.” They also contributed to a set of interconnected assumptions, reflections, and hopes for the future that were coalescing into a uniquely Christian vision of the campaign, one increasingly espoused not just by chaplains and German clergy in the homeland but a wide swath of ordinary Christian soldiers. Combining elements of a “crusade” mentality with an evangelizing impulse, this vision cast the invasion as both divine punishment for the Soviet Union's past sins and as a means to return religious worship to the land of the godless, thereby helping to restore Europe to its Christian roots.
For those who adhered to this perspective, the Soviet Union had been taken over by an atheist clique whose efforts to turn their people away from God had resulted in economic collapse and cultural decay. Hans Albring, for instance, opined that the USSR's economic difficulties were the inevitable outcome of the country's choice to “deify labor and work” instead of the Almighty and argued that “without religion no culture seems able to grow or [even] exist.”Footnote 100 Albring's assessment was widely shared. The Protestant chaplain for Ninth Army, in which Albring served, took note of the troops’ “[r]ecognition of the connection between godlessness and Soviet conditions.”Footnote 101 As many of its personnel came to believe, the Wehrmacht was now serving as a tool in a divine plan to punish the Bolsheviks for their unholy ways. The prospect of doing their part to accelerate the USSR's downfall served as a powerful motivation for some Christian soldiers. “I would not like to wage war against anyone,” Franz Siebeler wrote to his parents and siblings in Nordhausen the day before the attack, “but these murderers and God-deniers must receive their punishment.”Footnote 102 His words reflected the militant stance of the chaplaincy's leading figures, as well as prominent homeland churchmen such as Bishop von Galen.Footnote 103
The desire to participate in the destruction of an atheist power often coincided with hopes that newly occupied territories would provide fertile ground for evangelism. “I wonder,” Konrad Jarausch mused in a letter to his wife at the end of August, “if a new Christian spirit can rise up from the rubble?”Footnote 104 Two weeks later, he contacted the Martin Luther Bund to ask for Bibles and religious brochures in Russian that he could distribute to the population.Footnote 105 Heinz Rahe, a Protestant pastor and lieutenant in the 13th Panzer Division, discussed the purpose of the invasion with a chaplain and several comrades. Rahe largely dismissed the antisemitic and economic arguments others put forward. The chaplain believed that Germany was God's instrument for eliminating the Soviets. Rahe himself preferred to see the war as an opportunity to restore religion to the USSR. “As we then were walking by [a] former church,” he wrote his wife, “the hope grew again in me that in a free Ukraine perhaps also Christian preaching would be possible again. This wish is also a goal for me, for which it is worth fighting.”Footnote 106 Early into the campaign, chaplains added to this missionary outlook by holding worship services in former communist headquarters or next to toppled statues of Lenin and Stalin. “This meeting room of the godless has become a worship room,” stated chaplain Hans Leidl with satisfaction after he transformed a commissar gathering space in Kiev into a makeshift chapel.Footnote 107
For men like Leidl, Jarausch, Rahe, Albring, and Siebeler, religious motives were not a secondary concern, but one that could stand alone as sufficient reason for risking life and limb on the wide plains of Russia. They transformed the conflict into an event of nothing less than cosmic importance—a battle “for the defense of Christianity in our Fatherland, for the salvation of the church from the threat of anti-Christian Bolshevism,” as the Catholic Archbishop of Paderborn put it in a published sermon addressing the uniformed men of his diocese.Footnote 108 For other soldiers, religion took its place alongside a host of other motives, including antisemitism, support for Germany's Nazi leadership, old-fashioned nationalism, and colonialist impulses.
The Reopenings Unfold
Guided by enterprising chaplains, encouraged by homeland clergy and the ambiguous rhetoric of Nazi leaders, and animated by a Christian vision of the invasion that emphasized anti-communism and vaguely defined hopes for bringing Soviet peoples back into the religious fold, German troops quickly set to work cleaning church buildings, converting them to their original purpose, and holding rededication ceremonies across the army's line of advance. These events unfolded spontaneously during the opening months of Operation Barbarossa in villages and urban centers alike, first in the Baltic and Bessarabia, then Ukraine, White Russia, and Russia itself.Footnote 109 They took place in areas of German control alongside sectors occupied by the Reich's allies, including Italy, Hungary, and Romania, and drew the attendance of local Orthodox believers as well as smaller numbers of Catholics and Protestants.
The geographic scope of the reopening services was matched only by their intense popularity. It is difficult to precisely estimate how many worshippers took part, but contemporary accounts indicate that they drew the mass participation of Wehrmacht personnel and Soviet civilians wherever they occurred. Witnesses reported churches filled to the last pew, with additional onlookers packed into the aisles or standing outside and local residents frequently trekking many miles to be present for the ceremonies. In mid-September, more than 1,500 German troops attended a reopening service at the Catholic parish church in the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv.Footnote 110 In the main cathedral of another city, a Wehrmacht service reportedly drew hundreds of civilians and soldiers.Footnote 111 Given this level of interest, their geographic reach, and the roughly three-month duration over which they occurred, it seems likely that the total number of German and Soviet participants reached at least into the tens, if not the hundreds, of thousands.
Although there were many local variations, the services generally followed a common sequence of events. When they reached a settlement for the first time, soldiers—often at a chaplain's direction—hauled boxes from churches that had been serving as warehouses, removed machinery from sanctuaries-turned-factories, and emptied museums of atheism of their anti-religious propaganda. In this task they were frequently joined by local residents. Once the interiors had been emptied, they repaired structural damage, scrubbed floors, and restored altars, crosses, and other religious implements, many of which had been brought out of hiding by pious civilians. Shortly after, chaplains announced that they would hold services. Then, in some cases after a brief religious procession, soldiers and civilians from the surrounding area flocked to the church to hear the chaplain conduct the liturgy. In conjunction with these events, chaplains performed baptisms, marriages, and other rituals at the behest of Soviet residents, many of whom had not seen a priest in years. In other instances, civilians undertook most of these activities on their own after receiving permission from Wehrmacht authorities.
Whatever form they took, surviving accounts make clear that the reopenings constituted an emotional—and spiritual—high point among the events of the summer and fall of 1941 for those who attended, above all for the Ukrainian, White Russian, Russian, ethnic German, and other Soviet civilians who had retained their Christian faith despite years of repression. From their perspective, the ceremonies were first and foremost an opportunity to express deeply held religious beliefs and celebrate the end of one of the communist regime's most unpopular policies. In many cases, it was in fact civilians who took the initiative to ask chaplains for spiritual care or German officers for permission to worship once again.Footnote 112 Their desire for a renewal of religious life was a major impetus behind the services, and they participated with enthusiasm in every step of the process.Footnote 113 Pihido-Pravoberezhnyi, a local resident who witnessed the reopening of a church in the Ukrainian village of Staiky, captured the euphoric mood of the populace: “The women prayed, all the time wiping away the tears that were trickling down their cheeks. People greeted each other as if it were Easter. From both sides of the church … one could hear the refrain ‘Christ has risen!’ and ‘The Lord wished us to live to see this happy day.’”Footnote 114 In another village, an old man even proudly came forward with the church bell he had hidden away.Footnote 115
The readiness of non-Jewish civilians to associate with Wehrmacht personnel in such an intimate sphere may seem strange in hindsight because they had already begun to suffer rape, theft, and indiscriminate violence at the hands of German soldiers, a pattern that would only intensify as time went on.Footnote 116 In the invasion's first months, the brunt of the criminal violence committed by the Wehrmacht and the SS Einsatzgruppen that followed in its wake was directed at Jews, POWs, and Soviet officials.Footnote 117 For many churchgoers experiencing initial contact with German troops, however, the army's terroristic intentions had not yet come into full view.Footnote 118 They hoped that the invaders—especially those with crosses around their necks—would treat them as fellow Christians and usher in a brighter future marked by religious freedom and better economic prospects. There was also an element of opportunism in their participation: by helping to expunge the communist legacy, Soviet civilians indicated that they could be counted on to cooperate in the establishment of a new German-led order. “We threw out all the exhibit materials and burned them in a public place,” one Wehrmacht infantryman wrote of the cleansing of a museum of atheism. “The population took part vigorously; old people trampled on the pictures of Lenin and Stalin.”Footnote 119 Perhaps, some residents predicted, the reopening services were a sign that the Germans would allow them a high degree of local autonomy, including in the religious sphere.Footnote 120
German soldiers were also swept up in the atmosphere of religious revival that accompanied the services. In his letter on the service he attended near Vitebsk, Hans Albring described the mood of reverence among the soldiers. Although one of his comrades became annoyed at the sobbing of two women who stood next to them, most of the men, he reported, set aside their accustomed cynicism: “They [women and children] fell to the ground, as is the custom in this land, and though every extreme situation evokes the mockery of the Landser … here everyone recognized what this simple Wehrmacht worship service meant to each Russian after twenty-four years of deprivation. The presence of God … was truly made manifest and I have never experienced such a feeling of being touched from above, and others said the same to me.”Footnote 121
Similarly, onlooker Josef Schmitz, reporting on a service held by a priest-soldier familiar with the Orthodox rite, noted, “As the worship service began and they heard the holy scriptures in the liturgy, they [local civilians] cried for joy, and even the hardest among the Landser furtively wiped away a tear.”Footnote 122 Chaplain Anton Ullrich, who looked after the spiritual needs of ethnic German villagers near Odessa, expressed a similar sentiment when he dubbed the experience, “probably the most memorable worship service of my forty years as a priest.”Footnote 123
For religious members of the Wehrmacht, taking part in such worship activities was especially meaningful because it was a way of tangibly realizing both elements of the Christian vision of the invasion that had taken shape over the previous weeks. On the one hand, Christian servicemen viewed their participation as a means to demonstrate the triumph of religion over communism's materialist ideology. As one Catholic private wrote after his unit worshipped in a Soviet church with civilians in attendance: “[T]he empire that one wanted to build without God is breaking apart. Speaking in human terms, the Lord God has avenged himself on his persecutors.”Footnote 124 Even though every moment was needed for the forward advance, rededication services were from this perspective just as important as military victories, if not more so, for they struck a blow at the very heart of the Soviet regime.
On the other hand, the services allowed pious soldiers and chaplains to personally take part in the country's religious renewal. “I wanted to come and baptize the children,” wrote chaplain Albert Bartsch of his ministrations to the Russian Catholic community. “I wanted to show the people of the village that they now had their religious freedom again.”Footnote 125 In their accounts, Christian personnel described how intensely the population had yearned for the return of religious freedom, emphasized the intensity of their own religious experience, and rejoiced at the prospect of returning the Soviet Union to the fold of Christian nations. As a soldier with Army Group Center who witnessed a reopening ceremony commented, “For years, Bolshevism tried to rip every trace of faith in God from the hearts of men. And now faith is rising more radiantly than ever in the Russian soul. After general absolution, many went to Holy Communion for the first time in years in order to receive Christ, after whom their souls burned. The Russian people are finding their way home to God again.”Footnote 126
Although Wehrmacht personnel typically treated Soviet civilians as racial inferiors—the product of years of ideological indoctrinationFootnote 127—and were determined to wipe out the Soviet Union as a state, it appears there was still room for feelings of empathy at least toward the beginning of the campaign. Germany's warriors sometimes considered civilians the unfortunate victims of oppressive Soviet policies, and as they interacted with the population in newly opened churches, Christian soldiers in particular appear to have felt at least some measure of spiritual kinship with men and women they had recently discovered to be fellow believers. Indeed, in their letters many expressed admiration and even a hint of envy at the deep religiosity ordinary Soviets seemed to possess. Writing home to his pastor, Catholic soldier Josef Vogt observed the “irreproachable moral behavior of the Ukrainian children and women in the countryside,” who had maintained their Christian faith under difficult circumstances. “They must win the admiration and respect of every German soldier who still has a spark of honor … And they do it, often unconsciously and unintentionally,” he wrote.Footnote 128 Hans Albring opined that the Russians enjoyed a proximity to the divine, “a holiness, a sign from above and from the light,” that was absent in the lives of Western Europeans.Footnote 129
The sense that the Wehrmacht was accomplishing a divine mission to enact the spiritual liberation of the Soviet Union was especially manifest in reopening ceremonies conducted among ethnic German communities in the Black Sea and Volga regions. In one such settlement, recounted Catholic chaplain Anton Ullrich, troops and civilians gathered around a makeshift altar in such numbers that Ullrich had to perform no fewer than three mass baptisms and two Holy Communions. Soldiers even carried local children on their shoulders to be baptized, taking on the traditional role of godparents.Footnote 130
Everywhere they took place, the reestablishment of churches conveyed for German participants above all a powerful sense of the moral legitimacy of their cause. They allowed soldiers to physically enact the role of religious liberators, righteous warriors who fought to bring back a fundamental dimension of human life to a land led astray by an evil ideology. By participating in these activities or giving the locals permission to do so, soldiers proudly identified themselves as men who promoted Christian traditions, in stark contrast to the country's former rulers. “Above the doorway of the church,” wrote the XXIX Corps Protestant chaplain describing rededication activities in an ethnic German village in Ukraine, “soldiers repainted the words ‘Give our God the glory,’ a phrase that … appeared to [the villagers as] an allegory for the attitude of the German spirit vis-à-vis Bolshevik insanity.”Footnote 131 Whether or not they also found justification in Nazi ideology or other rationales, men who helped open churches could always look back on the occasion as a powerful justification for their participation in the conflict, proof that, as Franz Siebeler wrote in a letter to his family, “this war against the criminal work of Bolshevism is the battle for a righteous cause.”Footnote 132
Of course, not all soldiers who took part in reopenings necessarily did so out of deep convictions. Some likely saw them as a break from the terror of battle, the endless monotony of marching, and long hours on watch. Others saw themselves as tourists and relished any opportunity to see more of the mysterious and “primitive” culture of the East, whose Orthodox rites some criticized as having more to do with superstition than genuine faith.Footnote 133 Whether they took part out of curiosity, sympathy for the population, or religious convictions, however, contemporary depictions of the reopenings suggest that most did so with genuine enthusiasm and often without waiting for official sanction from higher authorities.
Indeed, the vast majority of rededication services do not appear to have been the result of any concerted planning on the part of Wehrmacht authorities, but rather the spontaneous initiative of chaplains, civilians, and soldiers on the ground. Still, they would not have occurred at all without the tacit permission of officers up and down the chain of command.Footnote 134 When the invasion commenced, official army policy on the matter of religious contact with the population remained opaque.Footnote 135 Under these circumstances, the final decision to allow the services often fell to local commanders. These generally proved amenable, especially once they recognized that the services engendered goodwill on the part of the population. The commander of Infantry Regiment 413, for instance, described in glowing terms how the initial mix of uncertainty and outright hostility in the village of Morosovo turned to “immense trust” after a squad of German engineers set out to repair a former church and the troops of his unit worshipped inside amid close contact with the locals. “Now they wear their Sunday clothing again and have been greeting the German soldiers ever since,” he wrote.Footnote 136 After performing a service in Belynichi attended by civilians and 250 servicemen, the Catholic chaplain of Second Army reported that officers praised such events as a propaganda masterstroke.Footnote 137 Only in a handful of instances did chaplains or men recount disapproval on the part of their military superiors.Footnote 138
Once the reopenings got underway, high commands across the front slowly established more official policies, with most army staffs settling on a form of tacit approval. Some insisted that soldiers and civilians be kept separate during such events. Others allowed reopenings with no apparent restrictions.Footnote 139 Although high-ranking officers rarely seem to have involved themselves in the logistical details—they had their hands full with other responsibilities—a few gave chaplains direct orders to carry them out.Footnote 140 The regulations they handed down often betrayed ideological unease at allowing close fraternization between soldiers and civilians. Nevertheless, such considerations were often overridden by the recognition that the ceremonies possessed immense propaganda value.Footnote 141
If officers gave the reopenings their implicit blessing, the Wehrmacht's propaganda corps was even more enthusiastic, recognizing an opportunity to sway the hearts and minds of Soviet civilians, as well as Red Army soldiers. Members of the Propaganda Kompanien wrote triumphant articles in army newspapers that encouraged the troops to be proud of their role in restoring Christendom and dramatized the population's supposedly boundless gratitude toward the Wehrmacht.Footnote 142 A September issue of Signal, the Wehrmacht-published magazine with worldwide circulation, sported a cover with a German priest-soldier baptizing Soviet civilians and coverage of the “homecoming to religion.”Footnote 143 Some of the most prominent reopenings appear to have been carefully choreographed for maximum propagandistic impact, such as a service held by Sixth Army's Protestant chaplain, Hunzinger, in the cathedral of a major Ukrainian city. It featured German battle flags and a Wehrmacht choir. “The Ukrainian participants constantly thanked the German soldiers for eliminating the traces of Bolshevik tyranny here, too,” crowed an army journalist covering the proceedings.Footnote 144 As German soldiers read about the reopenings in Wehrmacht newspapers, army officials produced a flurry of pamphlets, placards, and other media that assured civilians and would-be Red Army deserters they would have the opportunity to publicly worship again, a promise that would remain a key theme in Wehrmacht propaganda throughout the conflict.Footnote 145
In drawing attention to the reopenings, Wehrmacht propagandists, like many officers, placed pragmatic concerns over notions of racial purity. Sixth Army photographers, for example, displayed no qualms about snapping photos of civilians and soldiers worshipping side by side, photos that were later censored on ideological grounds.Footnote 146 From the perspective of propaganda workers, the religious events of 1941 presented an opportunity they simply could not pass up, one that would enhance the Wehrmacht's image in the eyes of its own men, observers in the homeland, and the occupied population.
As the case of the censored images suggests, the reopening services in many ways directly subverted the invasion's ideological goals, despite the approval of many officers and the enthusiasm of the Wehrmacht press. Years of intense indoctrination, codified by harsh orders at the outset of Barbarossa, made it clear that Soviet inhabitants—ethnic Germans excepted—were a race apart, to be treated at every turn as inferiors, never as equals. By bringing conquerors and conquered in intimate physical proximity and shared religious ritual, the reopenings generated a sense of solidarity not only among Wehrmacht soldiers themselves but with Slavic civilians, a development that bore scant resemblance to the Führer's vision for a new racial order in Eastern Europe. Still, whether because they recognized a common religious outlook, nursed a measure of sympathy for a people who had been deprived of religious life, simply were caught up in the emotionality of the moment, or perhaps because they could not resist the chance to play the role of heroic liberators, most Wehrmacht troops appear to have set ideological prescriptions aside as they participated.
Not all of the rededication services featured the direct comingling of civilians and soldiers. Sometimes the population was present but took part from a distance or held their own service after the Wehrmacht liturgy ended.Footnote 147 In these cases, none of the accounts explain the reason for the separation. Factors included a desire on the part of the Germans to maintain some semblance of racial boundaries and fears of associating too closely with “enemy” civilians. There was also the problem of limited space in the overfilled churches, the language barrier, and a certain hesitation on the part of a population that still did not quite know what to expect from the invaders. Even in cases in which civilians and soldiers did not worship shoulder to shoulder, however, the atmosphere was still one of mutual celebration, and there was likely more contact than Nazi officials would have liked.
Although they contradicted some of the fundamental tenets of Nazi racial ideology, however, the reestablishment of churches rarely seems to have been intended as a conscious act of anti-Nazi resistance. The Nazi administration had itself already given lip service to “crusade” sentiments, and troops with Nazi affiliations who took part in reopenings do not appear to have anticipated the Führer's disapproval. Many still considered Hitler a divinely inspired savior who supported Christianity, or at least a certain version of it, a narrative Wehrmacht propagandists encouraged.Footnote 148 Tellingly, the Protestant chaplain of Thirty-Ninth Corps reported that he had proudly announced to ethnic German residents during a reopening service that “in Adolf Hitler's Reich, every person is able [to] freely live his faith.”Footnote 149 In all cases, however, troops’ willingness to associate so closely with civilians in religious matters certainly represented a break from the wishes of their nation's leader and a failure of the army's indoctrination program.
The Erlass
On August 6, 1941, OKW issued a Führer-Erlass (decree) to immediately halt the religious comingling of soldiers and civilians. This stipulated that religious life among the civilian population “should neither be promoted nor hindered” and that “members of the Wehrmacht must unconditionally keep their distance from such affairs.” The order made clear that chaplains were forbidden from ministering to anyone outside the Wehrmacht and forbade missionaries from visiting the occupied Soviet territories.Footnote 150 In the middle of September, Hitler issued a supplement to these instructions. This stipulated that Wehrmacht worship services could not be performed in Soviet churches and that “the participation of the civil population (including Volksdeutsch) in field worship services of the Wehrmacht is forbidden.” Each chaplain was required to acknowledge in writing to the leader of his unit that he had read and understood the orders, a sign of how seriously the Führer took the matter.Footnote 151 Later in November, Hitler decreed, “Until further notice nothing should be published [in the domestic German press] about the religious situation in the Soviet Union.”Footnote 152 Although he did not include an explanation for his decision, it was no doubt motivated by the desire to ensure that his Aryan soldiers did not associate with Slavic “subhumans,” an objection that reflected concerns about the worship services already being voiced by the SS and Gestapo.Footnote 153 He also—along with the SD and OKW—feared that the Eastern Orthodox Church might become a center of political resistance and that the Vatican would take advantage of the situation to spread its own influence.Footnote 154
The Erlass met with strong protests from senior chaplains and a number of high-ranking officers. Both war bishops, Dohrmann and Rarkowski, attempted to have the decision overturned or at least modified.Footnote 155 So too did the Protestant and Catholic chaplains overseeing Army Group Center.Footnote 156 They received the support of the Army Group's leadership, including its chief of staff, who registered his objections in writing to Brauchitsch, the head of OKH.Footnote 157 The requests fell on deaf ears.
Having largely explained the war to themselves and their fellow soldiers as a crusade, chaplains reacted to the order with a sense of profound betrayal. “What a blow to us, and a folly against the locals!” reflected Catholic theology student Franz Cremer.Footnote 158 Many troops expressed similar disbelief and disappointment. The Catholic chaplain of Second Army summarized the reports of his subordinates: “The ban on the use of former Russian churches for Wehrmacht services is a great concern … the agitation among the troops, among officers and men, was equally great.” He paraphrased their response: “‘We're supposed to be fighting for a Christian Europe.… Why this prohibition?’”Footnote 159 The Catholic chaplain of Eleventh Army made a similar observation:
News from the homeland regarding certain actions vis-à-vis the civil church, as well as both decrees of OKW that forbid any spiritual activity for the civilian population have effected confusion and a certain undermining of trust among the soldiers. The disappointment regarding the denial of spiritual help for the civil population has hurt the German image, since the civil population had also expected liberation in religious matters from the person of the Führer.Footnote 160
For men who had found religious meaning in the invasion, the sudden reversal dealt a serious blow to morale. Nevertheless, most Wehrmacht servicemen put their personal feelings aside and followed the order, with a few defiant exceptions.Footnote 161 Army units received news of the decisions slowly and in piecemeal fashion, but by at least October 1941 the reopening phenomenon had effectively come to an end.
Although the services took place over the course of only a few months in the summer and fall of 1941, their significance was far reaching. In addition to generating momentary goodwill on the part of non-Jewish civilians still unsure of the Wehrmacht's full intentions, they paved the way for the policy of tacit toleration for religious activities that would come to constitute an important element of German occupation policy, both for the army and the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. In practice, local churches and their leaders still faced numerous restrictions, but even this incomplete form of freedom of worship proved to be one of the few measures that enjoyed popular support over the long term.Footnote 162
Further, rededication services not only boosted Wehrmacht morale at the invasion's outset; they fueled one of Germany's more successful wartime propaganda campaigns by adding moral ammunition to an arsenal in which chivalrous deeds were in short supply. The German press wasted no time in using the reopenings to portray the nation's soldiers as noble Christian warriors and launched a propaganda broadside against the USSR's allies and potential allies, including the United States, for supporting an atheist regime.Footnote 163 So effective was this effort that Sergius, whom Stalin would appoint patriarch of Moscow in 1943, coauthored a book in which he and other Orthodox officials responded to German “crusade” claims by insisting that Soviet Christians did not require religious liberation of any sort and explaining that it was their spiritual duty to fight against fascism.Footnote 164 In order to counter Axis propaganda and win over skeptical allies, Soviet officials found it necessary to scale back their earlier policy of persecution and even attempted to don the religious mantle for themselves.Footnote 165
Finally, the army's activities made a great impression on German church leaders, heightening their support for an otherwise unpopular war. Surviving Catholic press organs covered the events enthusiastically, portraying them as a reassuring sign of the religiosity of Germany's young men and the beginning of a new spiritual era for the USSR.Footnote 166 Even Bishop Graf von Galen, erstwhile critic of the Nazi regime, commended the reopenings as proof that military leaders were determined to save Russia's population from the “Bolshevik plague.”Footnote 167 The Protestant Church collected thank-you letters from Volksdeutsch Protestants in the USSR and took up collections for religious communities in lands seized from the Soviets.Footnote 168 Its director of foreign affairs composed a book describing Soviet persecution of religion that included a triumphant account of the reopenings.Footnote 169 Church leaders interpreted them as a sign that the Nazi regime was softening its policies toward religion, a hope that would never come to fruition.
The next months and years brought with them mounting complications for the Wehrmacht's religious life. In 1942, new regulations stipulated that fallen chaplains would no longer be replaced, one of a spate of new decrees put in place by Nazi officials and sympathetic officers that limited the chaplaincy's effectiveness.Footnote 170 Extreme conditions and the lack of clergymen meant that many soldiers did not have the opportunity to worship for years at a time. Zealous Nazi officers interfered with Christian practice by altering holiday ceremonies and refusing to notify troops of upcoming worship services. Hans Albring lamented that there was no Christmas service for his unit in December 1941. “The authorities even debated whether it was appropriate to allow the singing of ‘Silent Night’ at the Christmas celebration,” he added. “Isn't it too Christian?—that's what one asks here.”Footnote 171 Albring also numbered among the Christian troops who expressed alarm at the Nazi state's escalating moves against the churches in the homeland.Footnote 172 Over time, even the relatively successful policy of religious toleration in former Soviet territories began to lose its luster as the SD and German occupation authorities took steps to limit the influence of the new church organizations that had emerged in the invasion's aftermath.Footnote 173
Religion remained an important feature of Wehrmacht life, however. Although worship services were few and far between, chaplains frequently recorded high attendance numbers and reported that many troops expressed acute interest in religious matters.Footnote 174 Soldiers unable to participate in formal rituals turned to private devotion and conversations with comrades or homeland correspondents. Religious contact between the invaders and Soviet civilians persisted even after the Erlass.Footnote 175 Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, many troops still considered themselves members of a Christian army and drew sharp distinctions between their own side and their “godless” opponents, a theme Wehrmacht propaganda continued to promote.Footnote 176 By the war's later stages, the triumphalist crusade narrative of 1941 had largely faded, but it gave way to a powerful new religious paradigm that would characterize early postwar memory of the Wehrmacht, one that emphasized Christian suffering and martyrdom through symbols like the Stalingrad Madonna.Footnote 177
Conclusion
The army that took the time to reopen churches and attempted to clothe itself in religious legitimacy was the same army that, from the first day of the invasion, launched a campaign of terror, rape, and criminal violence that frequently bore more resemblance to genocide than conventional warfare. Those who took part in rededication services or proclaimed the return of religion to the USSR habitually recorded acts of criminal violence against the population, often by men from the very same units that had paused to worship side by side with their victims. Around the time that Second Army's Catholic chaplain held a reopening service and several baptisms in the Belorussian town of Belynichi, Wehrmacht administrators directed the registration of the town's Jews, a standard army policy and one that paved the way for their mass murder by Einsatzkommando 8 and local collaborators in the fall and winter.Footnote 178 Konrad Jarausch, who had planned to hand out Bibles to local civilians to spur on a religious revival, watched as the Soviet POWs in the camp where he worked slowly starved to death as the result of the Wehrmacht's policy of deliberate neglect.Footnote 179 The pattern repeated itself across the region as army personnel took part in the mass killing of Jews, political functionaries, prisoners of war, and suspected partisans in accordance with Hitler's vision for a new racial order in Europe.
On its face, the army's involvement in the rebuilding of Soviet churches sharply contradicted both its usual pattern of mass terror and the racist ideology that animated the campaign. Participating personnel violated strict rules against racial intermixing and displayed a modicum of respect toward men and women they had been ordered to treat as expendable. Instead of emphasizing racial differences, the reopenings brought conquerors and conquered together in a shared display of religious faith and mutual enmity toward communist atheism. Why, then, did they occur at all, given that the army rarely showed any hesitation in following Hitler's program to the letter?
As this article has argued, the reopenings were the product of a host of overlapping factors, including religious discourse in Germany, wartime messaging, and institutional dynamics. For decades, the German churches had portrayed the Soviet Union as a threat to European Christendom and nursed the hope for its spiritual rebirth. Cognizant of Christian support for the invasion, Nazi leaders borrowed elements of religious rhetoric in their own propaganda. Encouraged by their experiences in western Europe and enabled by ambiguous regulations, chaplains willingly took on the role of missionaries. Soviet citizens, many of whom had retained their traditional faith, actively petitioned the invaders to overturn the former regime's religious policies and were eager to position themselves on what appeared to be the winning side. Military officers and propagandists hoped to score a public relations victory. Most of all, influenced by the discourse surrounding the campaign and their own experiences, many Wehrmacht personnel at all levels adopted a Christian vision of the war as a crusade to return religion to an atheist land.
Although they posed a challenge to Nazi racial orthodoxy, the reopenings should not be read as a form of conscious resistance on the part of Wehrmacht troops. The vast majority remained firmly loyal to Hitler, and there is reason to believe that soldiers involved in the events assumed—owing partly to the tone of Nazi propaganda itself—that Germany's leaders approved of their actions. Further, the reopenings in fact harmonized with the goals and methods of the Vernichtungskrieg in several respects. Although they promoted a more conciliatory attitude toward the population than most of the army's policies, the reopenings encouraged Christian personnel to show no mercy toward the “demonic” Soviet regime and the Red Army, an attitude that had a great deal in common with Nazi plans. The services also meshed easily with the colonialist thinking that underpinned the invasion by implying that the Soviet population required German leadership to guide it back to the Christian fold. Beyond this, the Wehrmacht's participation in the reopening of Soviet churches recast the entire campaign as a virtuous enterprise, allowing Christian soldiers and their relatives in the homeland to cling to the illusion that their side remained decent in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, while generating a pious smokescreen that made it difficult for non-Jewish Soviet civilians to predict the army's next moves. In the final summation, regardless of the motives of individual participants, the reopenings played into the Nazis’ hands by making it easier for German soldiers—including those who questioned the regime's policies—to accept their participation in a war marked above all by genocide and criminal violence.
Examining the reinstitution of churches and their context also reveals that Christian traditions exercised a more profound influence on Germany's military personnel than most scholars have acknowledged. Despite Nazi efforts, Christian rituals and ideas still permeated all levels of the Wehrmacht's hierarchy. Fellow believers formed an ad hoc subcommunity who developed close friendships, discussed church affairs, attended religious events, and kept up ties with the wider Christian community back home. In addition to enhancing communal bonds, religion also shaped how soldiers constructed their identities and made sense of their participation in the war on the Eastern Front, alongside other factors such as ideology and the desire to be accepted by their peers. Encouraged by the rhetoric of the German churches, many troops saw themselves as noble Christian warriors fighting an epic battle against a godless state that threatened the future of Christendom. In some ways, this view overlapped with the Nazi vision, especially in its impulse to annihilate all vestiges of the Soviet regime as well as its colonialist assumption that the population required German leadership to rebuild its religious life. As the reopenings illustrate, however, the Christian conception of the invasion ultimately followed its own agenda, one that cast the war in religious, rather than racial, terms and portrayed the population, if not their leaders, as wayward souls who could yet be returned to the Christian brotherhood.
Finally, the case of the reopenings sheds light on the Wehrmacht's conduct as an institution during the early phases of Barbarossa, especially toward non-Jewish civilians. Although the army certainly showed no hesitation in carrying out the Führer's darkest desires, the fact that a wide swath of the Wehrmacht's leadership supported, or at least tolerated, religious fraternization suggests that a desire to maintain ideological purity was not the only factor that informed the actions of officers and propagandists. Instead, as scholars have increasingly recognized, the army displayed a certain level of pragmatism and flexibility in its dealings with the population, sometimes mixing conciliatory policies with terror if doing so seemed to provide a strategic or propaganda advantage. Officers who sanctioned the services hoped they would engender support for the Wehrmacht among the occupied population, thereby dampening the prospect of unrest or resistance activity. Propagandists recognized them as an opportunity to inspire Christian soldiers and drum up enthusiasm for the war in the homeland, all while presenting a global audience with an honorable image that bore little resemblance to the brutal daily reality of the Wehrmacht's conduct.
