Doris Bergen’s study of Wehrmacht chaplains, a project on which she has been working in some fashion since the late 1980s, can be summed up with a single sentence at the end of her examination: “In the Nazi empire, Christianity and Christian chaplains were essential components in a system of ideas, structures, and narratives that protected and rewarded the perpetrators of genocide and their communities even as it erased their victims and denied their crimes” (p. 232). Her evidence: the approximately 1,000 men who became military chaplains in the Third Reich between 1935 and 1945, who served reliably and effectively in their positions and (with very few, one-time exceptions) did not protest the regime’s policies or the war it waged or show solidarity with victims. She concedes that their intentions were often good, but ultimately their complicity was both active as well as passive, as their very presence helped to legitimize the Nazi war of annihilation.
Bergen crafts a concise but intense narrative about chaplains from both Christian denominations. Her first chapter acknowledges the chaplaincy’s pre-1933 origins and the final chapter looks at its transition and reconceptualization after 1945, but the bulk of her study is devoted to the period of the Third Reich. Among the many rich insights that she offers is her engagement with what she calls integrated history, incorporating the themes of religion, war, and genocide alongside gender, sexuality, bodies, and everyday life. This enables her to eschew a simple replication of the perpetrator’s gaze by gleaning essential details from counter-voices and other perspectives. She uses multiple kinds of sources to achieve this: the written material produced by chaplains themselves (reports, daybooks, diaries, letters), but also by soldiers and officers; the oral testimonies of survivors; representations in material culture; and photographs, some of which are included in the book. Indeed, her sensitive integration and explication of these photos, which feature both the presence and absence of chaplains, is one of the more arresting aspects of the study.
The resulting portrait of the chaplaincy as an institution is not surprising, given the scholarship that has preceded this book, but no less damning. She concedes that chaplains were not themselves killers, even if some of them participated in combat (they were allowed to carry sidearms at the front and in occupied territories but typically they were unarmed), but they enabled the genocidal violence of the war and its perpetrators. In fact, the chaplaincy “assembled a record of loyalty to the Nazi German state” that by the end of the war featured “a weaker record” of protest than “even those compromised institutions” of the military and the churches (p. 230). A variety of factors accounts for this ultimately reliable partnership, including cautious leadership that encouraged compliance, a persistent defensiveness that Christian clergy felt towards the regime, and the moral numbing of war.
Bergen is unflinching in delineating how Christianity itself facilitated this accommodation. In one chapter she outlines “war Christianity” (p. 24), a version of the religion that defines itself by its contribution to a war effort. Both Protestants and Catholics participated in this tradition, seeking to find in armed conflict a meaning and legitimacy for the church that they saw not only as exceptional but also as essential in any future of Germany in Europe. Such a view was predicated on beliefs in masculine strength, antisemitism, and a conceptualization of the nation as inherently Christian at a time when Christianity felt consistently embattled by secularizing trends. The marriage of war Christianity with the genocidal culture of the military determined that chaplains were predisposed to use language, rituals, and symbols to legitimize the world in which they operated. This in turn encouraged perpetrators of genocide to see themselves as noble, suffering warriors whose sacrifice brought salvation. Elsewhere she scrutinizes Christianity as a religion of inversion that at its core situates Jesus, the ultimate victim, as the vanquisher of death and sin. Such a facility for inversion came to rely on centuries-old hostility for and fear of Jews, who became targets for their supposed role in the killing of Jesus. Nazi ideology may have abjured any explicit religious terminology in its racial-biological antisemitism, but the perpetrators of genocide, many or even most of whom were raised in the Christian tradition, did not necessarily need to be fanatical Nazis to proceed with the killing. And the presence of chaplains, “magically transforming perpetrators into victims and victims into perpetrators, providing a narrative of salvation and redemption through blood” (p. 171), was for many of them vital. Thus the targets of genocide – Germany’s victims, including Jews, Soviet POWs, Roma, and non-Germans everywhere – were almost always outside this “universe of obligation” (p. 148).
After the war ended, the chaplains’ collective unwillingness or inability to confront the wartime criminality of German soldiers led them “to move from the side of the persecutor to the persecuted without in fact changing position at all” (p. 204). By this, Bergen means simply that the chaplains continued to stress the suffering of Germans, their unending sacrifices, their tragic heroism as good Christians who had merely done their duty. In response to Allied accusations of atrocities and crimes, chaplains (like other German military and political leaders in the immediate post-war period) pleaded ignorance or impotence. They highlighted their common (Christian) ground with their western Allied occupiers to ask that they continue their ministrations and to offer themselves as liaisons between Germans and their conquerors. With remarkable persistence, their consistent interpretation of total defeat emphasized redemption.
Bergen details the evolution of the chaplaincy during the Third Reich; the quality and limitations of its leadership; the daily lives of chaplains before and during the war; the exceptional cases of protest that never became open or organized resistance; and the silences in the chaplains’ records, which she supplements with the voices or images of victims, survivors, and onlookers. She makes clear that the regulations determining who entered the chaplaincy effectively weeded out all potential troublemakers, which goes some way to explain the lack of a more rigorous opposition during the war. She might have spoken more explicitly and at greater length about whether and to what extent chaplains felt themselves to be a community, a coherent group distinct from soldiers and united by a common vocation, given how relatively few there were – about 1,000 men total, divided evenly between the two Christian denominations, served a military of more than 18 million men over six years of war – and how spread out they were geographically, serving on all active fronts. This dearth of chaplains meant that it was not unheard of for clergy serving outside of the chaplaincy to step up and undertake religious ministrations when soldiers were in need, a practice that Bergen does not address. There is also a clear connection between the stance taken by chaplains during and after the war, about German Christian soldiers simply doing their wartime duty, and the evolution of the idea of a “clean Wehrmacht” that German soldiers and officers adopted in memoirs, courtrooms, and conversations, and that subsequently endured in popular collective memory in Germany and elsewhere for decades. One wishes that Bergen had elaborated more on this connection than she did in her final chapter and conclusion.
But these are relatively minor quibbles with an otherwise significant contribution not just to the history of the German military chaplaincy during the Third Reich but also of the churches in Nazi Germany, and to the intersection of religion, violence, and genocide. This book will be of obvious importance to historians of modern European history, but it should resonate with scholars beyond twentieth-century German history: it speaks to fundamental connections within systems and structures that feature (albeit disguised or denied) xenophobia, racism, antisemitism, and other forms of intolerance. Bergen herself acknowledges that she is far from done exploring those connections, and one can only await with anticipation her next contribution to the subject.
