Between God and Hitler

Military Chaplains in Nazi Germany

Doris L. Bergen

During the Second World War, approximately 1000 Christian chaplains accompanied Wehrmacht forces wherever they went, from Poland to France, Greece, North Africa, and the Soviet Union. Chaplains were witnesses to atrocity and by their presence helped normalize extreme violence and legitimate its perpetrators. Military chaplains played a key role in propagating a narrative of righteousness that erased Germany’s victims and transformed the aggressors into noble figures who suffered but triumphed over their foes. Between God and Hitler is the first book to examine Protestant and Catholic military chaplains in Germany from Hitler’s rise to power, to defeat, collapse, and Allied occupation. Drawing on a wide array of sources – chaplains’ letters and memoirs, military reports, Jewish testimonies, photographs, and popular culture – this book offers insight into how Christian clergy served the cause of genocide, sometimes eagerly, sometimes reluctantly, even unknowingly, but always loyally.

Doris L. Bergen is the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on issues of religion, gender, and ethnicity in the Holocaust and World War II and comparatively in other cases of extreme violence. Her publications include War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust, now going into its fourth edition, with translations into Polish and Ukrainian. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and has taught in Canada, the US, Germany, Poland, Bosnia, and Kosovo.

Advance praise

‘Doris Bergen’s eagerly-awaited magnum opus draws on searing testimony of Holocaust survivors and the banal homilies of German military chaplains to show us what it meant to preach Christian virtue to the soldiers waging their war of annihilation in the Soviet Union. Far from opening up a fault line between notions of ‘just war’ and genocide, sermons and spiritual guidance were an essential part of mobilizing Germans and the military chaplains were proud of their service to the very end. This is an extraordinary work. Bergen leads us through some of the most challenging moral issues raised by the Holocaust and she is the most historically and morally enriching of guides.’

Nicholas Stargardt, author of The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939–45

UK publication June 2023

US publication August 2023

334 Pages 9781108487702 Hardback £30.00 | $39.99 USD | $45.95 CAD

At a glance

• Draws on extensive, original research in German military, political, and church archives plus Jewish sources

• Foregrounds individual stories of many kinds of people in every chapter

• Helps to explain how the Holocaust was possible and how Christians became killers

UK publication May 2023

US publication July 2023

240 Pages

9781316512852 Hardback

£30.00 | $39.99 USD | $45.95 CAD

At a glance

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