Dagmar Pöpping's Kriegspfarrer an der Ostfront is the most recent contribution to a growing field whose contributors focus on the intersection of religious vocation, total war and genocide. What primarily distinguishes this work from those that immediately precede it – namely, Martin Röw's 2014 study of German Catholic military chaplains as well as my own 2015 work on Catholic priests and the war – is her attempt at a comparative study of the two Christian chaplaincies in the Wehrmacht, the Protestant and the Catholic. Such an endeavour is welcome. As she correctly notes, the two chaplaincies had much in common despite obvious distinctions, and the war created an environment ‘that often pushed confessional differences into the background and encouraged a new, common association’ among chaplains (p. 12). While she makes wide use of archival sources, the scope of Pöpping's analysis remains limited by what evidence has survived the war. The chief problem that this presents is that much of the official documentation about the Protestant chaplaincy was destroyed by bombs in 1943. Consequently her study, especially her examples, tends to be weighted in favour of the Catholic narrative.

Pöpping deploys her analysis in eight sections, dealing in turn with the organisation of the two wartime chaplaincies; the war on the Eastern Front; the roles that chaplains assumed; the socialising space created for chaplains by the war; the theology of death; conceptions of the enemy; wartime disenchantment and estrangement; and postwar tribulations and reflections. She offers some key statistics – 455 active chaplains for each confession on the eve of Operation Barbarossa, after which the number declined largely due to the regime's prohibition in 1942 on replacing those who fell or went missing (p. 20) – and underscores the importance of the chaplains’ religious autonomy within the military (they reported to field bishops who were not part of the ecclesiastical structure of either denomination) as well as the support that they received from army officers. Both of these factors enabled the chaplaincies to survive Nazism. In her examination of the Eastern Front, she emphasises the fateful overlap between Nazi ideology and Christian doctrine in identifying Bolshevism as a deadly and common enemy, enabling Catholic priests and Protestant pastors to embrace military service in spite of misgivings about the regime. She identifies a similar overlap in interpretations of death and theological justifications designed to make sense of soldiers sacrificing themselves for a greater cause; she cites the work of Heinrich Missalla in describing how chaplains explained the military's conception of the hero's death into a more explicitly religious connotation: ‘chaplains of both denominations intensively represented the Christian interpretation of dying in battle as the imitation of Christ and involvement in the Christian procession of salvation’ (p. 131). Chaplains no less than other soldiers were vulnerable to pessimism about the war's outcome, particularly after the German defeat at Stalingrad, and some went so far as to make comparisons between Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia (most of Pöpping's examples on this count are from Catholic chaplains). In the post-war era, chaplains of both denominations faced significant challenges in reintegrating into civilian life, enduring petty humiliations at the hands of fellow clergymen who had not donned a military uniform. Most veteran chaplains adopted the position taken by military officers and soldiers and insisted that the Wehrmacht was ‘clean’, and that it was the SS and foreign auxiliaries who had perpetrated wartime atrocities. Such an attitude would not change until the 1960s.

Pöpping's chapter on the ‘social space’ that the war created is among the book's most intriguing sections. Here her comparative analysis adeptly delves into both practical and doctrinal differences between denominations and examines their impact on how chaplains discharged their duties in the field. Protestants praised and encouraged attendance at non-denominational religious services, which Catholics viewed as a Protestant imposition (in fact, Catholic chaplains were bound by doctrine to recognise them as invalid, even illicit services, which Pöpping does not clarify). Prior to combat, Catholic chaplains prioritised the dispensation of the sacraments, particularly absolution and holy communion, because soldiers demanded this; Protestant soldiers, in contrast, preferred religious services and preaching. Catholic chaplains judged their Protestant peers harshly for being indolent and for encouraging the understanding among soldiers that attendance at divine services was mandatory. Protestant chaplains in turn judged Catholic chaplains as doctrinally inflexible. Elsewhere, Pöpping finds evidence that the Churches competed with each other through their chaplains, for rewards showcasing their wartime contributions (p. 44). But Pöpping also highlights important commonalities: both chaplaincies kept various statistics (though Catholics more than Protestants), for example about how well divine services were attended, or how many soldiers received the sacraments. Both valued support from officers. Both reported problems working with doctors in field hospitals. Both took very seriously their obligation to write to families of fallen soldiers and to accompany soldiers condemned to death for breaches of discipline to their site of execution. Even if relations were generally strained, and negative prejudices and stereotypes endured, Pöpping argues that ‘the situation of a common daily life [in war] brought numerous opportunities for interdenominational conversations. From these emerged the potential of a new ecumenism between Catholics and Protestants’ (p. 111).

Pöpping returns to this ecumenical possibility when she notes that the experience of war and captivity brought Catholic and Protestant clergy closer together, and that ‘centuries-old prejudices between the denominations were either mitigated or eliminated’ (pp. 194–5). While this idea will please those readers eager to find the seeds of post-war reconciliation and Christian fraternity in the experience of the war, Pöpping's supporting evidence for this assertion is ultimately too weak to be convincing. What a careful reader is instead impressed with is that, despite the shared experience of wartime suffering and hardship among chaplains that she documents, more significant ecumenical shifts are not evident. In spite of the few individual chaplains that Pöpping cites on this point (once again, more Catholics than Protestants), the leadership of the institutional Churches drew back both during and after the war from working more closely with one another. After 1945 the two Churches continued to find themselves in similar situations – enjoying a renewed social and political prominence as a result of the lack of state institutions; justifying their lack of resistance to Nazism and role in the war; helping surviving Germans to interpret their wartime losses through Christian frameworks – but Pöpping speaks little about the extent to which they discussed these commonalities, or even acknowledged each other ‘across the aisle’, as it were. Admittedly, her book is concerned primarily with the war on the Eastern Front, and so finishes in 1945. But the penultimate chapter on ‘backwards glances’ is chiefly concerned with the post-war period, and Pöpping offers several important observations that could have been further developed.

The narrative that Pöpping constructs synthesises the holdings of many German Church and State archives and much of the relevant historiography on the subject. Her grasp of relevant German-language work is impeccable, indeed she is an established contributor to it, but on research written in English she is less firm. While much of her study retreads ground covered elsewhere, Pöpping introduces new voices that she has unearthed in the archives, which enlivens the material. And while she inevitably encounters the problems inherent in any comparative study – an imbalance of available sources, as well as attributing undue significance to limited evidence – she is the first scholar to attempt a side-by-side assessment of the two Christian chaplaincies in the Wehrmacht. A reader already informed on this subject may be disappointed to find little that is revelatory in her analysis, and several questions remain unanswered, particularly about the relationship between chaplains and soldiers: how effective were chaplains, really, in altering the mindset of the soldiers with whom they worked, either towards battle, or the war, or religion? How successful were they in their mission to bring individuals back to God? (pp. 45, 189–91) To what extent did soldiers side with chaplains against the National Socialist Leadership Officers (NSFOs), which the regime introduced in late 1943? How did chaplains make sense of the atrocities that they witnessed or heard about, either to themselves, to each other, or to the soldiers committing them? Some of these questions, particularly the last, can hardly be analysed because thus far we have uncovered a paucity of relevant evidence regarding them (p. 171); others perhaps lie beyond the scope of this book. But Pöpping's work suggests that the study of Wehrmacht chaplaincy now has a solid edifice from which scholars can pursue more focused investigations into the intersection of religion, faith, national identity and war.