Lauren Faulkner Rossi offers a well-written and compelling examination of German Catholic priests, seminarians, and chaplains in the Wehrmacht in World War II. This complex case study of authority and morality under dictatorship sheds valuable light on the larger relationship of Catholics to the Third Reich. No “ordinary men,” these clerics constituted a distinct cohort whose vocation, training, and faith, Rossi demonstrates, facilitated their service to a genocidal regime. Devoted to God, country, and their Catholic brethren-under-arms, Catholic chaplains failed to understand their wartime actions as political. Nationalism, antisemitism, comradeship, and above all anti-Bolshevism blinded priests to Nazi crimes and to their own complicity in them.

Products of the thriving interwar Catholic youth movement, this group of some 17,000 military priests and seminarians and 545 chaplains constituted a relatively small subset of the seventeen to eighteen million soldiers who served in the Wehrmacht as institutional representatives of Catholicism under a regime bent on eradicating religion. According to a secret appendix to the Nazis' 1933 Concordat with the Vatican regulating the treatment of clergy, theology students, and seminarians under universal conscription, all priests and men training to be priests were eligible for the draft—though in contrast to Protestant clergy, Catholics were not required to bear arms and priests and advanced seminarians who did not serve as chaplains were to perform medical service. Under constant pressure from the army and especially the Nazi Party, Catholics in the military suffered even greater restrictions on clerical representation, influence, and religious activities than did Catholics on the home front.

The degree of Nazi repression makes Catholic collaboration all the more striking, especially collaboration on the part of the Catholic military leadership. Field Bishop Franz Justus Rarkowski and his more competent second-in-command, Field Vicar-General Georg Werthmann, together “made the Wehrmacht's pastoral care system into an efficient part of the war machine” (81). While Werthmann in particular negotiated with military officials to defend Catholic religious freedoms, there is no evidence that either man protested Nazi treatment of Soviet prisoners-of-war, Jews, or civilians in occupied countries. With an eye to the lessons of their recent history, particularly the Kulturkampf, most Catholics exhibited loyalty to the state. For the most part, they accepted Nazi betrayals of the Concordat without dissenting in public in order to protect Catholic interests and defeat communism. In pursuing this course of action, they followed cues from their bishops, whose debates among themselves resulted in silence about the persecution of non-Catholics. The exceptional papal encyclical of 1937, Mit brennender Sorge, drafted by Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, provoked a severe backlash by the regime because it decried Nazi racial doctrines and Concordat violations, but the Church had failed to criticize Nazi measures in previous years, including the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. In a point that Rossi underemphasizes, the Nazis responded to Catholic pressure to remove crucifixes from Bavarian schools and, to a lesser degree, to Catholic opposition to the euthanasia program. One wonders what the impact of additional Catholic mobilization on behalf of non-Catholics might have been.

Rossi offers keen insight into the importance of doctrine and tradition in explaining Catholic myopia, elucidating how, in addition to obedience to authority, Catholic theology (particularly Corpus Christi mysticum) reinforced Catholic unity in suffering and the “primacy of Catholic souls” (190). Indeed, postwar discourse and memory gave the lie to claims that Church silence regarding Nazi crimes against non-Catholics was purely strategic. Postwar clerical laments focused exclusively on Catholic suffering, whereas priests interviewed by journalist Karl-Heinz Peschke in 1990 expressed few regrets about their Wehrmacht service. As they had during the war, these clerics justified their acquiescence in a war of racial annihilation by emphasizing the pastoral care they provided fellow soldiers and by stressing that their loyalty had not been to the regime, but to the Church.

Rossi makes excellent use of underutilized sources such as diaries and letters, as well as clerical and military reports. She focuses primarily on two dozen priests and, in particular, on the prolific Werthmann, whose notes for an unfinished book on Catholic pastoral service in the army are housed in the Catholic Military Bishop's Office in Berlin. Her efforts to rescue Werthmann from historical obscurity are worthy and persuasive, even if it remains difficult to generalize about Catholic clerical behavior from a single case, and the author should have provided, especially in the book's second half, a broader context for Werthmann's language, observations, and experiences. Work by Axel Schildt (Zwischen Abendland und Amerika: Studien zur westdeutschen Ideenlandschaft der 50er Jahre [1999]) and Vanessa Conze (Das Europa der Deutschen: Ideen von Europa in Deutschland zwischen Rechstradition und Westorientierung (1920–1970) [2005]) on the eastern front as a crusade to save the (Catholic) Abendland; the late war and postwar religious revival and discourses of rechristianization; clerical prominence in postwar politics; Allied-Catholic relations; as well as interpretations of the Third Reich according to which Catholics were Nazism's primary and most innocent victims—all of this would have provided valuable historical contextualization for the sources Rossi examines here.

Two larger questions hover over the book as well. One is the question of interconfessionalism, raised here by ecumenical services ordered by the army; the other is that of dechristianization. Rossi provides tantalizing evidence of younger soldiers' hostility or indifference toward religion, even as soldiers and civilians turned increasingly to religious practice in the late war years and many soldiers and families relied on chaplains to provide spiritual comfort. Finally, there is the fascinating and unexplored theme of sexuality evident in clerical expressions of outrage about soldiers' sexual behavior.

Rossi's thesis resonates with what previous research tells us about the resilience of Catholic religious identity into the postwar years, despite the Church's failure to draw a clear line against German racialized nationalism. Concurring with Michael Phayer (The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965 [2000]) that priests and seminarians soothed many Catholic consciences by actively or passively collaborating with the regime, Rossi's excavation of the history of Catholic clergy in the army provides rich insights and important new information about church-state relations in the Third Reich and, more broadly, morality and religion in politics and war.