Ep. 69- Wehrmacht Chaplains and the Holocaust with Doris Bergen

How could one be a man of God in Nazi Germany?  And, especially, how can one minister to the Wehrmacht, itself an instrument of the Nazi state while professing to adhere to Christian morality?  These are the questions that Doris Bergen deals with in her book on German military chaplains.

In this episode, we talk about the Nazi relationship with churches in Germany as well as about the ways in which German military chaplains became complicit in the crimes of the Third Reich.

Doris Bergen is Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Chair in Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto.

Bergen, Doris. Between God and Hitler: Military Chaplains in Nazi Germany (2025)

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You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:00.782)
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Waitman Born. And today we are going to talk about yet another group of Germans that fall into a very complex category with regards to sort of their behavior during the Holocaust. And this is the German chapel in the corps in the German military. And I can't think of a better person to talk about this than the great Holocaust historian, Doris Bergen, who just has recently published a book

all on precisely this topic. Doris, thanks so much for coming on.

Doris Bergen (00:33.912)
Pleasure to be here, Whiteman.

Waitman Beorn (00:36.236)
So can you start with the, cause you do in the book as well, can you sort of start with the origin story of this? Cause it's really fascinating. How did you get interested in this particular topic?

Doris Bergen (00:47.168)
You know, like so many topics, it starts when you stumble across a gap. I wrote my PhD dissertation on the German Christian movement, German Christian faith movement, and that was already a fairly understudied topic at the time. I mean, there was a lot of scholarship on Christian opposition to Hitler, but not too much about the pro-Nazi elements, you know, within the Protestant church. But

while I was researching German Christians, I came across a letter in a church archive from a Lutheran pastor, a German Lutheran pastor, but he was living in a really small town called Looseland, Saskatchewan. And it caught my eye because actually my father grew up in Looseland, Saskatchewan, along with about like maybe a hundred other people, like it's really small. And that pastor, you know, he was probably quite bored there.

He wrote in 1935 to the German Reich Bishop and said he wanted a job in the Wehrmacht chaplaincy. And I was shocked because I had been working on German Christians for quite a long time and I had never seen any mention that there were Christian chaplains in the Wehrmacht. So I dug around, I found there were two articles written by the fantastic military historian Manfred Messerschmidt.

in the 1970s and nothing else. So that's how I got started. It was one of those things where I thought, you know, it's a simple topic, really limited, and I'll just, you know, crank this out quickly as my second book. And let's just say 30 some years later, I finally finished that book.

Waitman Beorn (02:39.286)
And I do have to say, I love the little anecdote there about somebody asking Stephen Ambrose about whether there were German chaplains and him just saying no. And of course being totally wrong, guilty pleasure there. Can you start by giving us maybe a little, just a little background into the military chaplaincy in Germany, because I think you point out in the book that it's experience or it's

its depiction or its feelings about how it behaved in the First World War is a critical element of how it behaved as an institution, but also as individuals in the Second

Doris Bergen (03:17.824)
Yeah, I think for me at least this was one of the many interesting things that I found when I started to look at the chaplaincy like before that explosive moment really of the summer of 1941, you know, because of course that's where the questions really surge like what were chaplains doing when Germans were massacring Jews and Soviet prisoners of war. But when I brought the story back further,

That's, think, what really helped me understand sort of how they got there in 1941. And the World War I piece is crucial. I think the German chaplains in World War I, in many ways, they were pretty similar to their counterparts in the French military or the British or the American or the Canadian for that matter, you know. But there were also some quite distinctive features that I think made a big difference afterwards.

One of them was of course that Germany was confessionally divided. So in World War I, there were Catholic chaplains, there were Protestant chaplains. And of course the same was true in World War II. But the rivalry and the tensions between those two confessions, I think played quite a significant role. And of course, when Germany lost the war, the kind of blame and recriminations

you know, that echoed around, those really laid a foundation, I think, for what I call in the book, the chaplaincy's defensive posture, you know? So yeah, most of the big armies, had chaplains in World War I, but when Germany lost the war, the fact that chaplains had been so loudly jingoistic.

it created a big problem in the post-war circumstances. What happens when you tell everybody God's on our side and then you lose? So, you know, that creates in itself a kind of identity crisis. And, you know, the whole stab in the back idea that Germany lost the war because the home front fell apart could really and was kind of crystallized around chaplains because it could also be like

Doris Bergen (05:39.606)
an accusation of the churches. The famous Hindenburg quote, I don't even know if he actually said it, that, you know, we here at the front feel that at home they're not praying enough. Like that idea, I think it put the chaplains in a pretty vulnerable position. The other just practical fact is after the First World War, of course, you have severe

limitations on the size of the German military, the hundred thousand man army, meant that a lot of chaplains were out of a job. So they were looking for ways to be relevant, ways to just get a paycheck. And there's some quite interesting research done actually by Derek Hastings about the important early role of Catholics, variant Catholic.

including a number of former chaplains in the early Nazi Party rallies. So you get a kind of confluence of factors of chaplains trying to prove, no, we were not somehow part of the failure of the German war effort, but we're part of what could bring success. And I think that, yeah, like that defensive posture,

and then the rivalry between the confessions, it really plays out into the Second World War.

Waitman Beorn (07:08.462)
And this is something I think that it's really well done in the book because it's almost, you when you talk about, you know, one of your friends or your kids, like you're being defensive, you know, it's like you feel this from the chaplains throughout the entire book of like, you're protesting too much and you're, know, mean, it's a great way of sort of, you know, too long, didn't read summing up the whole thing. It's, you know, they're defensive about everything.

Doris Bergen (07:34.508)
Well, and I think that point to me at least is so important and resonant because it's the state of being of the church in the modern world. You know, that craving for relevance and maybe not just for Christian churches, but maybe for all religious leaders. You know, the feeling that, in the past we used to have more power, we used to be more publicly prominent. The youth.

you know, are not showing up at services. That sort of craving for return to maybe often imagined good old days when, you know, religion really mattered. I think it's really, really widespread. And chaplains really were kind of at an epicenter of that, like trying to prove themselves, you know, look how important we are. And like I was so struck in the records that I looked at.

so many different reports from chaplains tabulating not only how many soldiers they buried or how many masses they performed, but how many letters they received from family members. What kinds of thanks those family members offered to them, ways that they could try to show, look, we're necessary, we're boosting morale, and we are an essential part of this war effort.

Waitman Beorn (09:01.23)
And I was going to say one thing that sort of popped into my head is that one criticism, and I'm not an expert on this, but one criticism that people could have after the first World War of chaplains would be that you sort of led people to the slaughter by sort of firing them up. And along with the whole lost generation, the whole loss of innocence and Dulce de Cormas and all of this, that the chaplains are

are sort of just as bad as the old jingoist men that send people off to war. And I wonder, was that something that they had to confront in Germany as well?

Doris Bergen (09:37.85)
I am so glad that you asked this question because it gives me a chance to tell an anecdote that I don't know, I feel like is quite significant. So one of the things I talk about in the preface to my book is it was hard for me at first to get traction with this topic. One of the reasons I set it aside is a lot of people just weren't that interested.

in the 1990s and so on, felt like religion was kind of not central, you know, to the big questions that a lot of historians were asking, not just about the Nazi period, but really about modern history in general. So I kind of, you know, kept that topic going, but I didn't focus on it a lot. And at one point I went to give a talk on the military chaplains at some place

in Washington state. And when I got to the venue, there was a small group, you know, three, four Vietnam vets outside the venue waiting for me. And I came up there, they're like, are you the lady working on military chaplains? And I'm like, yeah. And they said, we hated those guys. All they did was patch us up and send us back out again.

That made such a big impression on me, like that image, and I've definitely heard it in other contexts also. With the chaplains that I work on, it's almost like the flip side of that, that, you know, they are actually trying really hard to do exactly that thing, if you know what I mean, and to be seen, to be doing that very thing.

But what's interesting is after the war, after World War II, there's a lot of valorization of Christian chaplains like in popular culture, the kind of embodiment that they represented, the moral core of the Wehrmacht and so on. But underneath the surface, I think this criticism that the military chaplains were in a way on the wrong side.

Doris Bergen (11:53.536)
I do think a lot of people kind of almost intuitively understood and agreed with that point. And my evidence, which may seem strange, is the fact that in both Germany's, East Germany and West Germany, when they finally, you know, took a decade, got around to recreating a military, they completely repudiated, in one case pretty loudly, in the other case very quietly, that

version of military chaplaincy. So of course, East Germany, had no military chaplains. And you might say, well, was a communist country. Why would they have military chaplains? Well, communist Poland had military chaplains. So, you know, that was a choice and they're like, we're not doing that. West Germany, you know, they created the Bundeswehr. They had military chaplains, but it was a completely remade role.

They were no longer military officers. Their chain of command was through the church, civilian, not through the military. And their task was to be a conscience within the military, to advise commanders, to support soldiers in recognizing if orders were illegal, if they were being asked to be involved in atrocities. So it was a completely different model.

of what the chaplain's role should be. And I've never seen anyone explicitly say this is because of the chaplains of World War II. Well, that's not true. I have seen people explicitly say that, but no one in any position of power, you know? So yeah, I think that idea of the chaplains is just like patching up the man and sending them back out there. That is 100 % how they understood their role.

And that is what they tried to do.

Waitman Beorn (13:50.606)
Well, and this is, you know, I have to give a shout out to my fellow UNC grad, Jackie Witt, who wrote a book that you mentioned in your book on American military chaplain of Vietnam. But I think the relevance is obviously direct here where, you know, we use the term nowadays, moral injury, right? Which is, you know, when soldiers are dealing with trauma related to killing people or whether it's even just killing enemy combatants or whatever.

Doris Bergen (13:58.509)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (14:19.094)
And again, we'll get to this, I think, because there's one of the great examples that you show of sort of military chaplains when they actually did sort of stand up. You could look at it completely from the other perspective of they're just doing, they're just treating moral injuries and avoiding traumatizing. But anyway, I think it's a great connection that, you this idea of, of chaplains as a almost kind of like a spiritual Jag Corps, you know, who are sort of there to, advise commanders and soldiers on sort of what is morally.

right, you know, of course, because that's not, that's not how, least how the, my experience in the American military is, know, chaplains don't, don't, aren't explicitly certainly, certainly not explicitly tax was doing that, you know, and, and they're, much more sort of, if they're speaking truth to power, it's much more in sort of like how soldiers are being treated and that kind of thing. but I think it's, it's a, it's a fascinating tie and we're going to come to that for sure. I did want to ask one question I think I got from the book, which was,

In the First World War, were the military chaplains sort of seconded from the civilian world? they, they weren't, like they didn't have a rank. They weren't actually sort of career serving. Like officers, they were just sort of enlisted as chaplains. Is that, is that right? Or some of them were, or am I, am I missing?

Doris Bergen (15:37.878)
No, I think in the First World War in the German Imperial Army, the chaplains were indeed integrated into the material hierarchy, into their hierarchy. However, what you're saying is really relevant to one particular group of chaplains that were in the Imperial German Army and definitely not in the Wehrmacht, and those were Jewish chaplains. So you see a lot of literature and it'll say, there were German Jewish chaplains in World War I.

It's both true and not true. So there were rabbis who played that chaplain role for Jewish soldiers, but they, unlike their Christian counterparts, they were not integrated into the military hierarchy and they were paid, to my knowledge, by their own congregations. So in other words, they were allowed to provide religious services to Jewish soldiers, you know, but they were not, they did not have, say, officer rank.

They did not have that integration. that could be, you know what I mean, what you're thinking of. It's quite an interesting, quite an interesting kind of small history in World War I.

Waitman Beorn (16:47.47)
So if we go, if we move forward a little bit to, I guess, to the early Nazi period, you know, how are these chaplains selected? And, you know, and the vetting is fascinating. I mean, all the stuff you have in the book about vetting of chaplains is just really, really interesting. you maybe talk about those two things for a little bit?

Doris Bergen (17:09.346)
Yeah. So the selection process, I found that really, for me, answered a lot of questions because, like I said at the beginning, I came at that topic through that German Christian movement, that pro-Nazi Protestant element in the German Protestant church. And I expected

Waitman Beorn (17:29.356)
And maybe just, sorry, maybe we should pause really quick just for our listeners and maybe we can explain what the German Christian Church is because they're sort of fascinating in their own weird sort of way as well.

Doris Bergen (17:36.157)
yeah.

Doris Bergen (17:40.332)
Yeah, I think it's a really important kind of segment. know, I guess little known fact is that the German Protestant church under the Nazis, it remained intact. A lot of times people think, it splintered. You you had the confessing church, which was the opposition to Nazis. And then this group that called themselves the German Christians that were the pro-Nazi group.

But the fact is those groups remained inside the established Protestant church. So, you know what mean? They had their struggles. They had their conflicts over, you know, use of church resources and so on. But they remained inside that church, which accounted for about two thirds of the population of Germany. Other important thing to keep in mind, again, it's for Americans often weird.

is that the German state collected church taxes and distributed those to the two established churches, Protestant and Catholic. So that explains why you could say those elements wanted to remain in that established church, because if they cut themselves off, like churches in the United States or Canada, you know, they'd have to be on their own trying to fund their activities. So German Christian movement,

That started out as a group of pastors and theologians that were really interested in, you could say, synthesizing national socialist Nazi ideas and Christianity. So really trying to emphasize that these are not conflicting or rival movements, but that they can coexist.

You know, most people would say, well, that's pretty crazy considering that Christianity emerged out of Judaism and anti-Semitism is pretty core to Nazism. But members of that German Christian group, including theologians, they had a lot of ways around that, you know, lot of ways around problems like that. Just, you know, for example, they might point out that, well, you know, who was Jesus's father? You know.

Doris Bergen (20:04.418)
God. So, you know, what's his race? mean, so, you know, it sounds crazy, but what's crucial is that most Germans found it possible to square that circle. You know what I mean? And this is something, yeah, to really keep in mind that although the images of Germany as, you know, pagan SS runes kind of dominating everything,

This was a really popular way to discredit Nazism, especially during the war in the United States, is to say not that they're anti-Jewish, but that they're anti-Christian. But the fact of the matter is, even under Nazi leadership, more than 95 % of Germans, they remained baptized dues-paying members of an official Christian church, including Hitler himself, born and died a Roman Catholic. So yeah.

German Christian movement, you know, it was never like the vast majority. Most Protestants tried to keep themselves unaffiliated between that confessing church wing and the German Christian wing. But my point is that the German Christians really embodied, maybe in an explicit form, what most German Protestants managed implicitly, which was to identify both as Christian and as

comfortable, loyal to Nazism.

Waitman Beorn (21:35.626)
Yeah, I mean, and I always love with the German Christians, know, doing things like trying to remove Jews from the Bible and, you know, getting rid of Amen and Hosanna and Halleluiah. I mean, it just, the mental gymnastics to just sort of do that are just, they're just amazing, you know, because it's it's hard to, you know, it's, the Bible is pretty explicit document about, you know, how Jewish all the disciples were and Jesus and everybody else, you know, it's just, you know, it's hard to do.

So good on them for their ability to be mentally flexible to do that, even though it makes no sense.

Doris Bergen (22:11.224)
Well, and the thing is, it goes back to the chaplains too, because they did sometimes complain that soldiers would taunt them and say like, why are you coming at us with Christianity? Isn't that just Judaism in another form? And, you know, what is this turn the other cheek? These are not the qualities of a real fighting man. And then chaplains again, you know, that goes back to that defensive posture, you know.

because they were also defensive vis-a-vis those kind of neo-pagan elements. And they would pull out those arguments, often German Christian style arguments that, no, Jesus was not a Jew, he was killed by Jews. So that's the proof, you know? Or no, turn the other cheek does not mean you don't fight, that just means you respect your comrade. So they did have to navigate those challenges.

Waitman Beorn (23:05.408)
and

Waitman Beorn (23:09.418)
And, and I guess this leads us to sort of another conversation, which is the kind of how Christian were the Nazis or how nice were the Christians kind of question, right? And in terms of the attitude, cause that, that, that, that example you just quoted, you know, is, an example of some of the Nazi propaganda that, you know, said things like Christianity is essentially a weapon of the Jews to make us all nice and soft and sensitive. you know, I mean, it's, it's a massive.

It's a massive question, but can you talk really quickly maybe about, you know, what are the not, and again, when I say the Nazis, that's not useful either because you have the crazy Himmler, know, runic pagan types, and then you have, as you point out, the more normal types in terms of Christianity. But what is sort of the viewpoint on Christianity and maybe what the Nazi, I don't know if there's such things as the official Nazi viewpoint, but Nazi perspective on Christianity.

Doris Bergen (24:06.424)
mean, it's a hard one to nail down because it's actually kind of changing the whole time. I mean, the historian Kevin Spicer, he talks specifically about the Catholic Church, but he uses the image of like a delicate duel, you know, and you see this, I think, entangled relationship of Christianity and Nazism. On the one hand, you do have some prominent Nazis

who were quite vehemently anti-Christian. know, Alfred Rosenberg is probably the most prominent example, but you also have many high-ranking Nazis who, first of all, themselves were practicing Christians, and secondly, who understood that Christianity was ubiquitous and it was not going anywhere. And so the chaplains kind of had to ride out that tension.

And what I see in the book is it often took kind of a simplistic form, which is basically when the German war effort was going well for Germany, chaplains often found that they felt less needed and less called on and that they encountered more of that kind of flack, like, what are you really doing here? And who really needs these teachings of, you know, love your enemy and stuff like that?

But when the going got tough, you know, when you have the defeats in North Africa, when you have the Stalingrad retreat, and especially the last phases of the war, there's a huge surge of interest on the part of soldiers who want to have a proper burial. You know, they've seen enough bodies thrown away like garbage, including bodies that they themselves, you know, killed. They don't want that happening to them.

family members who want to make sure, you know, my son died at peace, you know, with God. So you have a kind of, you could say almost undercurrent, you know what I mean, of Christianity that I think even for quite cynical Nazi leaders, Himmler is a good example, you know, they understood, okay, we don't want Christianity to be our rival for Nazi ideology.

Waitman Beorn (26:13.603)
Mm-hmm.

Doris Bergen (26:29.858)
but it can be an effective partner. And I remember years ago, Richard Stegman Gaw's book, he quotes, know, Himmler as saying to some SS man, look, you don't have to leave the church. You don't have to give up your church membership. If you don't want to, if it's going to upset your father, it's fine. And so I think there's a very, you could say almost pragmatic relationship, you know? And at the same time, there is that kind of

Yeah, very loud, noisy element of the anti-Christian, you know, strand that comes out at key points. Like, you know, when Alfred Rosenberg publishes that book, The Myth of the 20th Century, right, before Hitler came to power, and he says, you know, the Old Testament is the book of cattle traders and pimps. know, Christians in Germany, freak out, but

know, a couple years later Rosenberg, his ideas are in power, you know, Hitler can sort of distance himself and say, you know, that's just private views, that's not, you know, what we're all about. So those ideas, come and go and they create, yeah, like I think that kind of dual, that it's quite a dynamic relationship. So it's not a simple yes, no.

But the simple yes-no were the Nazi Christians. By every standard measure, they were. It's not two groups of people, it's the same group of people.

Waitman Beorn (28:01.964)
Yeah, overwhelmingly, yes.

Waitman Beorn (28:08.174)
Well, and I think I've read it someplace else. don't know where, but you it's almost like the Nazis didn't, they never wanted to force Germans to make a choice between Christian or Nazi because they might've been afraid of what people ultimately might have chosen. You know, if they sort of said we're going to, you know, disband the churches and outlaw Christianity, et cetera, et cetera, which, you know, might've been a plan for you know, victorious Nazi Germany, you know, 30 years after the war, but not necessarily something they want to try now.

Doris Bergen (28:38.21)
Well, this touches on something quite interesting that Gerhard Weinberg has often pointed out, that you know how Hitler loved to play around with Albert Speer with those models for Germania, the city of the future and all that. There were no churches in that model of Germania. So yeah, some future idea, maybe this would not be necessary. But in the present, particularly in wartime, when the issue was

You need to keep morale. You need to keep the home front from collapsing because they believe that stab in the back idea. know, much as maybe not every Nazi party leader or every military leader loved the military chaplains, they saw their utility.

Waitman Beorn (29:26.37)
And that's a great bringing us back to, hadn't forgotten the initial question I asked, which was sort of this idea of the vetting. you know, now we're getting into how do we get military chaplains in the Nazi state?

Doris Bergen (29:37.401)
yeah, the vetting. Sorry, I forgot about that. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (29:39.424)
You know, I led you down a different path, so I'm just bringing this back to the original path.

Doris Bergen (29:43.497)
Yeah, the vetting is super interesting. mean, first of all, it starts out, you know, when you have German rearmament 1935, the creation of the Wehrmacht, there were already a few chaplains because some of them carried over, right, with that small, you know, reduced military after the defeat of World War I. But there was lobbying right away, 1934, 1935, to get two military chaplains put in place.

Bishops, military bishops, a Protestant and a Catholic, and the two men who ended up in those positions, they really set the tone for what came after. So the Catholic military bishop was a man called Franz Justus Rarkowski. And he was a very, I would say, unrespected among Catholic bishops because

He was not well educated. He had been a chaplain in World War I and he did not have the requisite standing. You know what I mean? Among his fellow bishops, they did not want him. And it took actually years for him to be formally confirmed. So you already have someone there who owed his position completely. He was close to Blomberg, you know? So he owed his position.

completely to his partners in that German hierarchy. And he was very blustery and he spoke explicitly often, which was unusual for chaplains in using Nazi anti-Jewish terms. Like he spoke in, you could say, almost a crude language, quite unusual for theological types. So he was in there from the beginning, but

in a precarious position. didn't have that much respect on the church side, owed his position. So you see that defensiveness. The Protestant, a guy Franz Dorman, his situation was different. He was well-respected, had also been a chaplain in World War I, but his situation was vulnerable too because he was not affiliated with the German Christian movement.

Doris Bergen (32:08.262)
And in fact, he had a tense relationship with them. So a couple of key German Christians who got early chaplains appointments, they were always trying to undermine him and kind of push him aside, you know. So he too ended up being quite beholden on his partners within the military and within the Nazi hierarchy for his spot. So you have those two, neither of them were members of the Nazi party.

They were both fairly elderly. And so they set a tone, you know what I mean, of chaplains who would not rock the boat. And looking at the vetting, so, you know, obviously runs through the war, but it was a multi-step process that involved, you know, names being put forward by the civilian.

bishops, Protestant or Catholic, church regional church leaders, and then being vetted by the military bishop's office, by the Ministry of Church Affairs, by what was called Group S, Gruppe Seelsorge in the military, the military office in charge of chaplaincy, and finally by Gestapo or the SD. And so that security clearance at the end

That was where a lot of them got cut off. And often the Gestapo would recruit extra information from the police office, the police station, know, where those clergy lived or from the party. And just looking at hundreds of those files, those vetting files, which I saw in what was then still that archive in Potsdam in East Germany.

at the time I started that research, that's where that collection was held. Looking at hundreds of those files, what really became clear to me is that the biggest criterion was no troublemakers. No troublemakers, like looking for people who would do their job, work hard, know, try to serve the military.

Doris Bergen (34:30.368)
and not be forces of divisiveness. So it meant that sometimes on the Protestant side, super ardent members of that German Christian movement, if they'd been in fights or big, you know, conflicts within their home churches, they were not welcome as chaplains because they would not be the kind of, yeah, force in that role.

Waitman Beorn (34:57.526)
And it seemed like from the, from the examples given the book also that, and maybe I'm reading too much in behind this, behind the lines a little bit, but it seemed like that, you know, you had to basically that the, the, the Gestapo could find the smallest possible excuse. mean, like, cause you're, you're, you're a priest or you're a pastor. So you're going to say things that are, you know, nice. And maybe you might say something like war is bad or whatever, but it can be something as tiny.

as that that sort of gets portrayed as resistance, you know, and then you just get nicked for the.

Doris Bergen (35:29.612)
I know, and I was again so kind of struck by this point that you just made as well, because sometimes you would get, know, the Gestapo would go back, they'd find some file from five years earlier, you know, 1938, the November pogrom, Kristallnacht pogrom. You know, there were some priests, there were some pastors who said maybe even something very mild in the church.

And there was someone sitting in that congregation who gave a report to the Gestapo, know, pastors so-and-so criticized, you know, the actions of November 9th or whatever. Five years later, that guy's name comes up and they're like, no, you know. And, you know, first you see how rare it was that clergy did those kind of, you know,

words of defiance, I found much more often that the grounds for clergy being rejected as chaplains were not something so open of that nature, but on the Catholic side, it was usually that they defied restrictions on things like youth education. You know, so there were restrictions on, okay, the priest isn't supposed to have, you know,

youth club at a time that conflicts with the Hitler Youth meeting, stuff like that. So then a priest did that, somebody denounced him for that. Five years later, his file is sent back, like, no. So yeah, and then what's also interesting is at the very end of the war, when it's really clear that Germany's losing the war, the senior chaplains, they kind of start to disregard

some of those vetoes and especially with like the base chaplains and just to put their own guys in place and kind of ignore. So it's kind of fascinating how you know they try to keep chaplaincy as an institution going even kind of behind the backs of that system.

Waitman Beorn (37:46.886)
One of the that I noticed that was different is the very small number of chaplains. You mentioned in the book, I think there was around a thousand of them. And of course, for anybody familiar with the American military, for example, we have a chaplain at the battalion level. there were lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of chaplains. But in the German military, and this gets to something you talk about later in terms of they're always complaining that they can't be in 10 places at once, et cetera, et cetera. But there's actually a very small number of them to start with.

Doris Bergen (38:15.522)
And this is a point, again, it took a while for me to grasp the significance of that point. Like you raised earlier, the comparison with the first world war, you know, there were maybe 10 times, maybe 20 times as many chaplains in place during World War I as there were in World War II for the German military. So they were really, really stretched thin and it became more severe as the war went on.

You know, often they weren't replaced, they got sick, some of them got killed, some of them just became unable for various reasons to do their work. They often were not replaced. And that small number of chaplains, I think it really goes a long way also toward explaining why, you know, they don't have a more kind of defiant or heroic presence. I always think about the

point that Hannah Arendt makes that the essence of ethical existence is thinking. And thinking requires some calm. You know what I mean? Like thinking requires, yeah, to be able to stop, like you use that expression, to stop and think. Here you had guys who were like not sleeping for days on end, who are like...

rushing, trying to get fuel so they can get a vehicle and a driver so they can actually try to minister to the men that they're supposed to be ministering to. Or who are fighting their way through who knows what, storms and blizzards, or who are in military hospitals and dressing stations where they're doing the work of maybe medical personnel because there's no one there. So they are, you could see it in their reports.

They are maniacs of work and they don't have time to think. At synem's when I give talks on this subject, people will say like, well, didn't they think about what it teaches in the Bible about what's right or what's wrong? I'm like.

Doris Bergen (40:27.138)
You know, it's not to make an excuse for them, but it is actually an ethical, I don't know what the right word is, factor. When you have people who are, you know, not sleeping, have no time to literally gather their thoughts, that's often when it's really easy to see terrible behavior.

Waitman Beorn (40:51.566)
Well, I wonder if it also sort of contributed to their feeling at least and probably the reality that soldiers sort of thought that they were not particularly useful because, know, I never saw a brigade chaplain or division chaplain, you know, when I was in the military. I I saw our squadron chaplain all the time, but like when you have the idea of having one guy be in charge of all the sort of chaplain duties for, you know, 5,000, 10,000 people.

You know, it's just it's just absurd. I mean, like, it'd be like, you know, trying to scoop up the ocean and a thimble. I how could you possibly accomplish anything? And so I imagine some soldiers would be like, here comes the chap that I've never seen before popping up to encourage me to fight. like, where who is this guy? I've never seen him in my life.

Doris Bergen (41:40.628)
And this absence, I guess, it's really borne out. Like when I first started doing this research, I thought, I'm going to read soldiers letters. You know, there's a lot of collections of German soldiers letters that are accessible. I'm like, I'm going to read soldiers letters and I'm going to find out so much about chaplains and how they responded, what they thought of it. They almost never mentioned them. I read so many of those letters.

And it's exactly what you said when you have the chaplain, usually they're at the division level. Sometimes one Protestant and one Catholic, but sometimes only one or the other. They had an officer's rank, so they're hanging out with the officers, right? Like their closest people might be like the division medical officer or the veterinarian. Like those are also at that same, you know, level. That's who they're hanging out with.

or the officers. yeah, like turns out soldiers letters, they did not give me very many glimpses. And I remember the first one that I found was a soldier, I it was a Catholic soldier, writing to, I can't remember, a family member. And he said, today we were called on to attend an execution of one of our comrades, charged with desertion and the chaplain.

was there standing at his side. And I'm like, wow. Imagine what message that would send, you know? And later, just by coincidence, well, you how archival research works. I think I figured out, because I figured I knew where that was, which chaplain that was and which execution it was and the soldier who was being executed, the...

charge against him, this was in occupied France, the charge against him was that he was stealing like mail.

Doris Bergen (43:40.118)
So yeah, you know.

Waitman Beorn (43:44.748)
I mean, this is a great segue because I think we should talk about the elephant in the room, the elephant in the book, which, which is it, which is the, mean, it's not the elephant, the book you talk about it, but, which is the moral, the moral failure, I suppose of these guys, you know, and the, and their role vis a vis the Holocaust, vis a vis the genocide of so POWs and treatment of civilians. mean, even the, what you just mentioned, you know, the, the draconian German

military discipline system that killed 30,000 some of its own soldiers for things that may have been serious, but many of them were not. can you, and maybe the anecdote of, not anecdote, but the history of Elitistakov that you mentioned, that's kind of the most famous one, but it's a good intro into this topic, which I think is really important. So maybe we can talk about the Holocaust and military chaplains.

Doris Bergen (44:41.56)
I mean, this was for me the most important question. When I started working on this topic, I was like, well, where were the chaplains? And I told you that the first article I read about military chaplains was a pair of two articles by Manfred Messerschmidt, military historian. And it really struck me that chaplains were both, yeah, like obviously part of the military.

and an essential part of the history of Christianity. That's what I've been studying, you know, the role of Christianity in the Holocaust. They really brought those things together. And I looked.

so hard trying to find sort of explicit mentions where chaplains talk explicitly about seeing the murder of Jews.

There aren't a ton in sources from the time, but there are some. And they often come in very kind of indirect forms. So, for example, I found in an archive in Germany, the papers of a Protestant chaplain, Bernhard Bauerle, you know, his daughter was the addict story, like we were talking about earlier, his daughter really had those papers in the family's attic.

know, and had served on Germany's Eastern Front. He was physically at the site of so many enormous, enormous massacres of Jews in Lithuania, in Latvia, in Belarus. Like there is absolutely no way, you know what I mean, that he could not have been aware. And yet the most explicit evidence in his file

Doris Bergen (46:39.574)
was photographs that he included that had, for example, a picture of a skeletal looking man and on the back it simply said Jew, Latvia 1941, or a picture of bodies hanging, three bodies, you know, hanging on gallows and on the back Soviet prisoners of war.

So he kept those photographs and he labeled them and he labeled them with the names of locations where we know the massive murder of Jews in Lithuania in 1941. Extremely, extremely public, the German military right there, but he didn't include it in his official reports. It came that way. And so this is what I often found that the most explicit material

from the time was often indirect. The more explicit material I found in chaplains own sources comes from after the time. So you mentioned the case of Biletzerkva in German occupied Ukraine and the incident where two chaplains came upon a school building with dozens of Jewish children locked in that building. said soldiers told them

German soldiers that those Jewish kids were in there. They didn't know what to do. They called the chaplains. The chaplains tried to stop the killing of the Jewish children. They were not successful. The children were murdered. This story, of course, comes out of a post-war trial of a German Sonderkommando where the chaplains testified and they provided that story. It's a very

moving story and the chaplains, you know, talking about how they were so tormented and horrified and they tried to stop this killing, you know, but then Reichenau himself ordered that the killing go ahead. And when I first found that account in the military archive in Freiburg, I thought I had stumbled on something completely new. Later, like so often happens with historians, I found out other people also saw that and it was in fact

Doris Bergen (49:05.006)
quite a sensation during the time of that trial when it happened. But it took looking at other sources, Jewish sources from the region above all, to recognize that the chaplain's version of what happened there is only a really small part of the story. And maybe one of the crucial things is I noticed they sometimes made a mistake. Was that incident in July or August?

And I kept having to look up, but then I realized it was in August, but the Germans had arrived in Biletzerkva in July and they had begun killing Jews immediately. So what the chaplains in their post-war testimony represented as this isolated incident, this shock, you know, of innocent Jewish children being held, maybe it was even Ukrainians, you know, they hinted that killed them.

It actually followed a whole month of public open massacres of Jews in that region where the Wehrmacht was very, very present. So yeah, I had to do a lot of triangulating of sources.

Waitman Beorn (50:15.798)
And, and if I recall correctly, I think, I think I read one of the reports from one of the chaplains in, Ante Clay's good old days book with, with sources. And I think if I remember correctly, the, the way it was couched in the, in the contemporary report was essentially these children are screaming and crying all day long and it's keeping up the soldiers and it's stressing them out because they don't like hearing the children crying. Can you do something about this?

You know, the moral piece is completely about whether or not the chaplains and also the chaplains seem to be asking, can you guys do something about this? It wasn't, can you not kill them? It was just, can you get rid of them somehow and solve this problem?

Doris Bergen (51:00.374)
I this, think it gets at something that's really fundamental to my book that I think the chaplain's role is as part of what I described kind of creating a narrative of righteousness that transforms accounts that are accounts of murder and carnage and, you know, atrocity and devastation of civilian communities that transfer transforms those into a story of, you know,

War is hell for everyone. And the Germans were just trying to do their best under a terrible circumstance, you know, to be present for one another, to keep, you know, the sacraments available to keep Christianity alive. So transforming literally a story about Germans murdering Jews in occupied Ukraine into a story about Christian heroism.

under excruciating conditions. That transformation, I think, is in the end what my book is about.

Waitman Beorn (52:08.366)
And it's quite remarkable too, because, you know, there are a number of examples of Wehrmacht members doing heroic things to save Jews, you know, and not small heroic things. mean, like Major Plaga in Vilnius and Anton Schmidt and lots of others. So it's kind of amazing that there aren't at least a couple chaplains who at least would claim after the war to have rescued somebody. And it sounds like

The best they did was kind of massage their behavior, but none of them really said, and then I rescued these people or I stepped in to stop this execution. It's kind of amazing to me.

Doris Bergen (52:49.066)
It is kind of amazing. I think again, that vetting and that time factor, those things do come in. I think it's interesting to note that there are cases of prison chaplains, not military chaplains, but prison chaplains who did play heroic roles, for example, helping prisoners escape, helping to smuggle correspondence in and out.

Waitman Beorn (52:53.998)
Mm-hmm.

Doris Bergen (53:16.384)
it makes sense because you think a prison chaplain can develop a personal relationship. But the military chaplains, I've had the same sense. And the small acts of defiance, I have found a few small acts of defiance, but they, and interestingly in every case, were by Catholics. And they sent the top chaplains,

Waitman Beorn (53:21.069)
Mm.

Doris Bergen (53:44.142)
running, falling over themselves to say, this will never happen again, we'll take care of it. You know, so I'll give you an example. There was one case, it was a Catholic based chaplain, and he was doing, you know, religious service in a military hospital inside Germany, not at the front. And he took down the portrait of Hitler from the wall and replaced it with a crucifix.

and one of the patients in the hospital, they reported him and he got in trouble and the chief physician in charge of the hospital, both of them were transferred to work in a hospital in Warsaw. But there too, it was like completely the bishop apologizing, this will never happen again. I also found one case

of also a Catholic chaplain who in 1942, somebody, I don't know who, revealed that he had one Jewish grandparent. And somehow, you know, he made it through that vetting. Well, one Jewish grandparent under the Nuremberg laws that did not make you even a Michelin. You know what I mean? But nonetheless, you know, it was the same thing.

such a flurry of just groveling like, you know, he was appointed at a time when there was such a need and like something, you know, but the sad thing is I couldn't find out what happened. I couldn't find out what happened to that man. But yeah, the fact that those chaplains at Bilitserkva were really lionized after the war, you know, also made me think, boy, if there had been

other chaplains who had something credible that they could bring forward, you know, look what I did for the Soviet prisoners of war or look what I did to try to help Jews. You know, the only one, and this is really an interesting one, is a chaplain, Franz Stock, who was based in occupied France and who ministered to

Doris Bergen (56:04.002)
the hostages who were shot in reprisal killings. So that Franz Stock, it was Lauren Faulkner Rossi who first brought him to my attention. He's usually described as a prison chaplain. He was also a military chaplain and he is on the path to sainthood. He's like a hero of German, French rapprochement. But those reprisal killings beginning in 1942, you know,

the German military leadership, they didn't want to kill that many French people because they were worried for the backlash. So they just began substituting in Jews. that was, you know, and so like even that heroic, you know, there's a book about Franz Stock is called The Last Human Face, like that he was the last human face that was seen, you know, by these Christians before their deaths. But the fact is, you know, the vast, vast, vast number.

Waitman Beorn (56:41.069)
Mm-hmm.

Doris Bergen (57:01.13)
of people murdered and those were prized off killings. They were Jews.

Waitman Beorn (57:06.061)
Well, it sort of reminds me of the, you're, mean, actually you are familiar with Zimbardo's experiment where he brings in an actual prison chaplain to his simulated prison to have him interact with the people that this is the, for those of who know, this is the experiment into social obedience and cohesion and conformity. It had to be shut down after two weeks because it went off the rails. Anyway, Zimbardo brings in an actual prison, working prison chaplain.

to sort of play the role of prison chaplain in his little fake prison. And this prison chaplain witnesses all of the horrendous abuse that these students, volunteers are experiencing. And what he doesn't do is say, you guys, you should just leave because this is wrong and we should shut this down. He just played the role of prison chaplain. And let me give you some coping strategy or whatever. And it seems like, again, like the person you just mentioned, von Stagg, great.

But in the grand scheme of things, you're still massively complicit in the overall criminality of the regime. It's nice that you were human and sympathetic and provided some form of comfort to these people. But ultimately, your calling should have been to do something about it, or at least say something about it.

Doris Bergen (58:23.552)
Yeah, I mean, for me, that is really one of the deeply sobering aspects of this study is just how powerful like the systems and the roles that we're embedded in are, you know, I think, I don't know, everyone, at least I speak for myself, I like to think of myself as, know, I'm an individual, I'm autonomous, I make my own decisions. And it's really important to have that

sense of accountability and responsibility to try to live an ethical life. But it's also true that I'm part of systems that you could say are set up to benefit me, to cover up the harm that is done to others, and even to protect me from seeing that or even having to think about it.

This is what really came home to me in thinking about, you know, the military chaplains is when I started that project, I think I had a little bit that idea about like, well, were they good people or bad people? You know, so easy to think about Nazis, but those terms, well, good people, bad people, you know, but you realize that's kind of not really the question. It's like, how does this institution function to make certain things

Waitman Beorn (59:34.723)
Mm.

Doris Bergen (59:50.721)
Not impossible, but really, really difficult. Yeah. And the other insight is that institutions, their first loyalty is to themselves.

Waitman Beorn (59:57.228)
I mean,

Waitman Beorn (01:00:05.324)
I mean, what came through for me from the book is the absence of evidence and not of course, because it's badly researched. I I imagine, and I'm almost positive that these chaplains had many conversations with various soldiers about what we would call again, moral injury, you know, whether it was, and it doesn't have to be criminality, but I suspect that the criminal things that they either saw or participated in are part of it.

I would, I would almost guarantee, I'd almost bet my, my historical credentials on the fact that they had these conversations. but they simply do not then or now or then or post-war talk about them, which I found to be incredibly striking from the book. mean, because again, you know, one of the, these are things that you would think at least in the post-war period, they would reveal and say, yeah, you know, like I was pretty good person because I, I, I advised all these, soldiers about them.

witnessing this, that, and other thing, and they just don't say it. And I have to believe they had those conversations.

Doris Bergen (01:01:10.894)
I And you know, I kept thinking about, for instance, know, confession, obviously, you know, that's the moment where you think what kinds of things what chaplains have heard. And second, those many, many, many cases of chaplains being with condemned men before their execution. I was surprised how often they mentioned that in their reports and not just in 1944, either like 1942.

And you think like, what did those men tell them? Some of them, yeah, they were charged with stealing the mail or whatever. But others of them, they were charged with self-mutilation or desertion or fraternization with the enemy. Like there were no doubt people, I think about Heinrich Böhl, people who were tormented by the war that they were part of and tried to get out of it in different ways. But you

what chaplains heard from them. I have again, a few cases after the war, like a chaplain who talks about talking to a man who'd been involved in shooting Jews in the Crimea. And then the chaplain says, you know, I said to him, well, what could you have done? If you hadn't done that, they would have just shot you too, you know. But again, that's only after the fact, you know. And I also was struck by the contrast with

book, I'm sure you know, Conrad Jarosz, reluctant accomplice, you know. And so the wonderful historian Conrad Jarosz's father was also called Conrad Jarosz. And that father was a Protestant theologian, but not a chaplain. And, you know, he wrote letters almost every day to his wife, also a theologian. And he talked openly about, yeah, the

Waitman Beorn (01:02:41.902)
Mm.

Doris Bergen (01:03:04.686)
killing the starving of Soviet prisoners of war, like he writes to his wife, my hand is sore from hitting. And he says something like, it's really now more murder than it is war, you know? And he also talks about his relationships, you know, that he forms with some of those prisoners. And that man, had a PhD in theology, like he was, that was his life. He never mentions military chaplains. I read through that whole book, you know?

So yeah, like you say, the absence of the kind of, you know, smoking gun sources, I feel like it took me a while to recognize that that itself is part of the functioning of a system that literally erases its own victims in order to create

Yeah, a narrative of righteousness.

Waitman Beorn (01:04:05.646)
And there's the great example that you put and it's essentially, I'm going to get it correctly. There was a chaplain and he kept a very detailed diary of everything that he did and saw. at one point he is at a, I think a killing site or something. And he puts in there that there were around dead bodies or something and that the smell would stay in his uniform for days or whatever.

But you note, it's an amazing piece of historical detective work also to pick up on it, that he must have gone back and retroactively added that because he wouldn't have known at the time any of that. And again, can you talk about that? I it's a great example of this post-war revision, but it's also a very subtle revision that he didn't want to draw attention to it per se, but he put it in there because he thought it was important, he also wasn't going to highlight that he had been to that site.

Doris Bergen (01:04:52.194)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:05:04.226)
to talk about how bad it was.

Doris Bergen (01:05:06.296)
Well, that example is a really great illustration of how research is a collaborative process because it was Peter Fritchie who brought that source to my attention. He, cause he knew I was working on military chaplains. He's like, yeah, there's a diary of a Catholic chaplain, Alphonse Sotsker.

and it's located in this small archive in Berlin. And I was so excited and I read that diary was also typed, you know, which is incredible. I read that diary and it included a number of like really explicit accounts of like, yeah, showing awareness of mass murder of Jews. And this event that you're recalling, it was in Lviv. So in summer of 1941, where, you know, so many Jews were like massacred.

Waitman Beorn (01:05:54.2)
That's it.

Doris Bergen (01:05:57.743)
in the prisons in Lviv, and then there was that enormous, enormous pogrom. And so Chaplain Satchker, he has that statement where he's like, yeah, I went into that prison, it was covered with blood, you know, it was horrific. And then he says, the smell stayed in my uniform for four days. And that was exactly what tipped me off, because I was like, how is he gonna know? It's like a diary with that date, you know, how does he know how many days from now that smell is gonna be there?

And then I realized it was such a pattern, like all of those things where he taught explicitly, you know, those had clearly been added and they even use the kind of vocabulary of how, you know, Germans talk about the Holocaust in the 1970s, you know, and then he said at the end, I retyped this diary before donating it to the archive in, you know, whatever year it was, 1972. So I'm sure that's when he added those things. And

Again, it doesn't mean that they aren't true, you know, and they're quite interesting, you know, he was there in that prison, seeing all that. But they also

Waitman Beorn (01:07:08.716)
And again, that speaks to the, that speaks really quickly to like, again, there are not many of these chaplains. So wherever they mean, wherever they show up in a place, it's because they intentionally meant to be there, you know? And so like if he's in Birgigi prison or whichever prison he was in Lviv, like he has chosen to go to that place for whatever reason. So I mean, it's fascinating.

Doris Bergen (01:07:29.986)
Yeah, you know, and I think it also goes with something else that chaplains really prided themselves on is how close they were to the man and how, you know, they were there in the midst of the action. Yeah. So the whole issue around sources, I think it's an endless, you know what I mean? It's an endless project looking from different angles and sides and finding

different things. just got to mention one more because we talked about Biletzerkva and the chaplain saying those Jewish children were killed there and it was horrible and they make it sound like, yeah, it was this contained event. Well, my colleague, Anis Sternczes, who works on Yiddish songs of World War II, we were talking about this and she said to me, there's a song about the massacre of Jewish kids in Biletzerkva.

Yiddish. And she gave me that song, our graduate student Eli Yanni translated it for me. It's referring to that same event. So again, like you see how an event becomes narrativized to a certain purpose, and you only begin to see that when you get outside and look from another angle.

Waitman Beorn (01:08:53.614)
I mean, that's amazing too. yeah, I mean, for those of you that get a chance, mean, obviously read Doris's book, but you can also read some of these primary source documents that have been translated in the Anticlade volume of the good old days. reading the reports of those chaplains after reading Doris's book will give you a whole different sort of sense of what these guys are doing. And I think it speaks to a little bit of, know, again, my...

My first foray into in writing with Holocaust was of course the German army. And these chaplains are sort of vestiges or perhaps even standard bearers in a certain sense of the clean Wehrmacht. know, because they're, they're, they're sort of, they're meant to be these in the way they portray themselves. And again, now we're talking post-war, but I find that just as fascinating in some ways as everything else. You know, they're portraying themselves as sort of, you know, standard bearers for

the common soldier and their fingers in the dyke of all the suffering that they could impact. But again, I come back to that great example from that diary of a guy who he realized that there was something in his experiences as he wrote them down that people might begin to question. Like, you're in this prison. This is sort of adjacent or what are you doing in here? And so he felt the need to go back and edit it.

rather than just say, well, I'm not going to donate this to the archive because I don't want the archive to, I don't want somebody like Doris to later pick this apart. So again, that's a really interesting choice to me. know, one might think that if you had, you know, skeletons in your closet, you might just say, okay, well, I'm just not going to donate my diary, but he clearly wanted to tell some story.

Doris Bergen (01:10:40.3)
wanted to or felt that he couldn't get away without telling it. You know what I mean? Because now again, I hadn't thought about this before, but I'm thinking about the timing. And, you know, he gave in that manuscript in the early 1970s. Well, that's the same time that Manfred Messerschmidt, you know, wrote those articles about chaplains. But it's also the same time as, I guess, let's say, round, not round one, it was probably already round two.

Waitman Beorn (01:10:45.917)
okay.

Doris Bergen (01:11:08.366)
of exploding the myth of the Klin Wehrmacht. You know what I mean? Like I think now people think, oh, that was, you know, it exploded in the 1990s. It's like, well, it was actually exploded in the 1940s and then in the 1970s and then again in the 1990s. And then again, like there are those myths that have to be re-exploded over and over and over again because they are comfortable, you know? And anyway, so.

I think there was actually a lot of research in the 1970s coming out that was really challenging, that claimed that, you know, it was just the SS that carried out crimes and the Wehrmacht was clean. So it could be that there was also a little bit of a feeling of, you know, better to get out in front of those challenges and manage my narrative. And then at least I can say, you know, look,

Waitman Beorn (01:11:59.533)
Mm.

Doris Bergen (01:12:05.688)
that communists committed terrible crimes over there and the revenge and the Ukrainians were bad. You know what I mean? Because what I do find in the post-war accounts where former chaplains talk more explicitly, for instance, about death marches that they observed or roundups of forced labor and the incredible brutality that the Germans used on those occasions, even if they describe themselves as being present.

Often there's a theme of, I tried to intervene, but I was powerless. Or they describe it almost as if they're like looking through a binocular. You know what I mean? Like it's described in these really distant terms, like they were watching it on a movie rather than I was in the middle of that. So yeah, and then one more thing on the Klienwehrmacht I wanted to add. I think you're so right that chaplains are actually really, important in that.

Waitman Beorn (01:12:46.85)
Mmm.

Doris Bergen (01:13:04.994)
myth of the Kliemwehrmacht because that image that Christianity was there. That's really important for a Cold War idea. Okay, maybe the Nazis were bad, but they're Christians, you know what I mean? Like us or whatever. And the chaplains after the war, they did provide a kind of automatic, what's the word I'm looking for? Liaison to their counterparts.

in French army, in the British army, in the US army, that they could almost like they did sometimes like negotiate for better treatment of prisoners, things like that. So there is a sense of, you know, at least a potential common cause.

Waitman Beorn (01:13:51.342)
I mean, it's really you mentioned that distance because it's something that I found a little bit more concretely in a lot of these in the first book, you know, lot of these testimonies from German soldiers who had witnessed or been very close to, you know, Holocaust shootings. They'd often describe these things in exceptional detail and then say they were 300 meters away. And of course, they couldn't have known any of the things that they just described.

If they were that far away. that's, that's, is sort of a, a way of, literally using physical distance to suggest sort of moral distance. And it sounds like that the chaplains are doing the same thing, but with more vague language, because it sounds like when they say, tried to intervene, they don't describe what they did to try to intervene. And they didn't say, and I went to the commander and said, you can't do this. And he said, no, because then somebody could, could sort of check that. I tried to intervene could mean anything.

Right? mean, is that your sense of these post-war discussions?

Doris Bergen (01:14:52.664)
Well, I did find I'm thinking of one particular case at Catholic Chaplain, Joseph Perrow, where he's talking about a roundup for forced labor in Belarus. I'm pretty sure it's in Belarus. And he does say, I went to the officer in charge and I said, you you have to stop this. And he said to me, father, trust us. This is terrible time, but when the war is over,

will go back to being, you know, decent people, something like that. So like, did that exchange really happen? It's kind of a fascinating, you know, idea, but there is that almost like alibi that, you know, in the hell of war, it's like, you know, all the moral expectations are lifted, you know.

So yeah, that was one case. Then I have another one, a death march in that case, a Protestant chaplain, Hans Leonhardt, where he goes to, you know, one of the guards, like he sees it's a death march, know, of Jews. And, you know, they're beating an old man. And he says, like, you know, you have to stop this. And he said, the guy just looked at him. And I knew if I pushed any more, you know, I would be just in there with the rest of them, which

know, we know that actually isn't the case, but that's a very common narrative that, any, yeah, the narrative that any kind of protest, you would just be quote lined up against the wall.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:21.485)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:34.252)
I mean, and again, it speaks to that sort of, know, maybe I'm, I guess, starting out setting perpetrators makes you a cynical historian, I suppose. But you know, you, you, you sort of expect these guys after the fact to add stuff, you know, like that guy could have said, and I gave him a crust of bread or whatever, you know, no one's going to verify that it's not big enough to rise to sort of the level of, of making a major deal out of it. But you know, the fact that they don't sort of say these things is, is again, it's just.

It's just fascinating. And I wonder then you mentioned sort of after the war, you know, where certainly the SS at a certain level are stigmatized. What about these guys? they, do they just go back and become local chaplains at local, local priests? Or is there, is there some stench of, of being part of the Nazi state that sticks with them?

Doris Bergen (01:17:26.742)
Yeah, it's a really complicated question to answer because it varies quite a bit. I think it varies quite a bit. I mean, you definitely have some who just go back into regular church service. You also have some, I'm thinking about this Georg Wirtmann, who was like second in command on the Catholic side, who end up playing quite an important role in the rebuilding of the Chaplain Corps.

You definitely have that. And you definitely have some who remain like the sort of angry old man, like another guy I'm thinking of who was in the Soviet PMW camp until the 1950s. And then, you know, he came back home. He brought with him, speaking of crust of bread, a crust of bread. And he told his family members, I'm going to put this crust of bread on the table at every meal so that you will never forget my suffering.

kind of a weird communion. it's like, yeah, you know, so I think there's definitely some where a kind of taint hung on them and they were sort of politely, you know what I mean, kept out of the post-war church, which had to rebuild its relations, you know what I mean, with the churches, with that community. Then you have some, like I say, who were able to navigate that quite well, like that Biertmann is really interesting.

Waitman Beorn (01:18:27.584)
Awesome family life, that one.

Doris Bergen (01:18:55.264)
And he kept track for years after the war of all the former Catholic chaplains. And he had like a network, you know what I mean? Where they wrote to each other. He published their obituaries. He made sure or helped some of them get different kinds of recognitions and awards for their service and stuff like that. So there was a kind of quiet attempt to rehabilitate some. But it's interesting. Something that came out of my project.

was the discovery of a Protestant chaplain's papers, and it's a chaplain whose name is Johannes Schroeder. He had been captured by the Soviets at Stalingrad. And so he was brought back to Moscow and he worked for the Soviets during the war, giving radio broadcasts to Germany. And he, his family, his wife and his kids,

They were arrested and held in a prison by the Nazi regime, but he eventually was able to come back to Germany. He never had much of a career within the church. And I think that idea of the chaplains as somehow not wanting to break ranks with the military as a whole, I think if they had altered the story and said,

I gave the crust of bread to the Jews or I helped, that would be breaking ranks. You know what I mean? With that setting up.

Waitman Beorn (01:20:29.87)
Well, and it would also be, it'd be, it'd be accusing everybody else too. Cause if I did it, nobody else did right then in the sense it's breaking ranks in that way too. Right.

Doris Bergen (01:20:40.078)
And so this Johannes Schröder, the reason that I'm so interested in this project, one of the, or two of the people who helped me with my chaplains project were the historians Hartmut Lehmann and Silke Lehmann. So Hartmut Lehmann, distinguished German historian of religion, former director of the German Historical Institute of Washington, DC. I invited him and Silke Lehmann, also a historian, to a workshop.

to go through the manuscript of my chaplain's book. As they were reading the manuscript, they were talking to some friend of theirs and they're like, yeah, we're going to Toronto to help our friend revise her book manuscript for this workshop. And their friend said to them, my father was a military chaplain. And the laymans told me, they knew her for many years, they had no idea her father was that Johannes Schroeder. She was like,

We have the texts. He saved all that stuff. We have the texts of his radio addresses that he gave from the Soviet Union. We have correspondence. have paper. We have all that documentation. And so the Leymans worked together with her and her husband and they produced an edition of those letters of Johannes Schroeder. So now we do have one chaplain.

And it's very interesting. He spoke very openly, like he gave a broadcast after the 20th July assassination attempt on Hitler and he called on Germans. He's like, Christians in Germany do not be afraid of the Soviet Union. They are not the enemies of Christianity. The enemies of Christianity are the fascists. But yeah, he, let's just say, was not that popular when he got back there to West Germany.

Waitman Beorn (01:22:35.224)
That's amazing. Do want to hear my military chaplain story from Germany? it's not nearly as amazing as that, but it's kind of funny. when I was in Stuttgart doing my Fulbright, I rented an apartment from a German guy and his brother had been in the Wehrmacht. And one night, he knew what I was working on or whatever. And he said, you want to come over to my brother's house in this little town near Stuttgart and have dinner. So we do.

Doris Bergen (01:22:39.682)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (01:23:03.798)
And we're talking in German and I asked him about this guy, I asked his brother, what'd you do in the Wehrmacht? And he said, I was a Fahre in Stalingrad. And I thought, my God. And so started, this is in German. And so I started asking him all these questions about like, you what was it like and how did you, how did you, you know, minister to the troops, et cetera, et cetera. And he keeps looking at me like, like I'm an idiot. And finally it dawns on me that he said Fahre, like driver.

He was a driver, not father, like priest. And so I was asking him all these sort of deep moral questions about like, or trying to, you know, in a nice way about, you know, spirituality. was like a truck driver. That's my military, that's my military chapel story, which is not nearly as exciting or as important as yours, but it made me think of that when you start talking about, you know, fathers.

Doris Bergen (01:23:35.758)
It's hilarious!

Doris Bergen (01:23:57.007)
That is an excellent one. And it makes me grateful that, you know, in your mind, you went straight to the chaplet.

Waitman Beorn (01:24:02.646)
I went straight to Chaplin because I was like, that's amazing. He was a Chaplin. that. You must have all kinds of things to talk about, you know, because Stalingrad and it's horrible. No, just, he was a driver. He just drove trucks. it's yeah. So, you know, cause for those of you that don't get the joke in German father P F A R R E R and father F A H R E R sound very, very, very similar. Unless you're sort of a, an amazing, you know, German speaker. And I was, I was okay, but I didn't, I didn't catch that. And so I went.

I went way down some weird road with this guy. anyway, Doris, thanks so much for talking about this. This is really an amazing topic. I think, you know, not to put too fine a point on it, we have the same, not the same, but similar challenges in today's military as well with regards to chaplains and not least of which is that in the American military, there's been a massive influx of

of evangelicals, a very sort of extreme version of Christianity that is not necessarily shared by everybody. And of course, the military chaplains in the American military are meant to minister to everybody, even to the extent of having leading, for example, Jewish services with Jewish lay people if they can't find a rabbi. And again, it speaks to an issue that

And this is a bit of a soapbox, but I owe it to Jackie and everybody else, is that military chaplains, the role that they really are performing in the American military, at least, and I would argue to a certain extent in historic militaries, is that of social worker. They're sort of there to care for soldiers and counsel them. And that's not necessarily a job that they've been trained for. They've been trained for religious services. And of course, in the modern context,

with, people that are generally speaking less religiously observant than the past, you know, what, what you really need is someone who is more of a trained counselor therapist type, you know, than, than a spiritual leader. And I think that, you know, the Jackie's book again, is a great example of this in Vietnam. You have these guys who aren't trained to do that sort of thing and are being asked to do that sort of thing. And of course, I think you can, you can look back to what Doris worked on with the German.

Waitman Beorn (01:26:28.044)
chaplains and just multiply that by a thousand because you know, when they're being confronted by people who are, have had moral injury, whether it's witnessing or participating in atrocities, these guys are absolutely not, not competent to, to, do that sort of therapy and also ideologically not willing or, or able to do that. one question I did have before I, before I wrap up, it's just a, a guilty question, but what happens to the German Christians?

And in a brief, a brief way, cause I know that could be another whole book and, and, know, Richard and other folks have worked on this, but you know, these guys, okay. So, so you could, you could claim to be a sort of a confessing church or a Catholic chaplain or Catholic, you know, and, and okay, you know, like you, you, you had to be in the very mouth, but you could say I was doing it for the troops, et cetera, et cetera. But the German Christians sort of have distinguished themselves by really going all in, putting all the chips in the Nazi basket. and then obviously that gets.

That's the losing bet after the war, but there's, know, now you've, you've sort of outed yourself as an extreme anti-SMI and extreme Nazi person. So do they have a different experience than everybody else? Or are they able to also kind of massage their, their histories back into being normal?

Doris Bergen (01:27:43.723)
Yeah, with a very few exceptions, they mostly are able to do pretty well after the war. And, you know, there's interesting work by Susanna Heschel, by Bob Erickson and others on this as well. But I think one of the things that really goes into their favour is the Cold War and the whole idea that, well, you know, any Christians are better than the sort of atheist, anti-Christian communists. So I think

That factor helps a lot. Secondly, those elements of the kind of neo-paganism, they became really handy after the war. So a lot of times you had, you know, even very pro-Nazi Christians could find something that they could point to as an example of how they had been disadvantaged or even persecuted in the Third Reich. Like one of my favorite examples is one, you know, German Christian

initiative had been, I can't remember this exactly, to rename some church, know, Hindenburg church or something. And, you know, some Nazi party official wrote and said like, no, you can't name the church Hindenburg church. Well, then after the war, they're like, look, you know, we were disadvantaged, we were shut down. Like, so in that kind of post-war climate, you know,

Many of them, especially those that were in theological, like university positions, they came out just fine. And in the parishes, same thing like ones who had been maybe really divisive, you know, they might be sort of quietly pushed out, but there wasn't any kind of a big purge within the churches. And, you know, I think it was really not in anyone's interest.

and often like the smallest thing, you know, in different kind of denazification hearings, like I preached a sermon on the Old Testament so that proves I wasn't really deeply committed. You know, I used Psalm 23, you know, the Lord is my shepherd, like they pulled out stuff like that to prove that they hadn't really been that anti-Jewish all along.

Waitman Beorn (01:30:04.268)
And I'm guessing that these chaplains tended to be older folks anyway. And so they didn't have as long a staying power, know, in the sense that, you they're not like 18 year olds. not going to be practicing for a long period into the post-war.

Doris Bergen (01:30:19.756)
Yeah, I mean, at first I thought that that was also true when I started gathering demographic information on chaplains, that older guys got the nod, but it wasn't necessarily the case. Like in that early round of appointments, you know, that very first round you had the older guys, but later, especially on the Protestant side, they did start to take younger guys as well.

But yeah, I haven't seen any cases of like, you know, dramatic, yeah, purging or being called to account. It's a much quieter, almost like, okay, we're going to remake the chaplaincy in a different form. But in our movies or in our public, you know, kind of statements, we're going to talk about the World War II chaplains like they were the embodiment of a Christian conscience.

in the midst of the hell of war.

Waitman Beorn (01:31:20.75)
Which is, which is in a certain sense, it's the institutional example. It's institutional counterpart of that diary example where the guy edited it sort of nicely behind the scenes, but didn't draw attention to the fact that he was changing the narrative a little bit. Um, well, I have so many more questions, but, I'm gonna, I'm gonna wrap up a little bit here, um, with your suggestion. We always ask, you know, what is one book on the Holocaust that, that you recommend or you're reading or you're finding important at the moment.

Doris Bergen (01:31:50.435)
Well, I'm going to go with an Aldi Goldi, which I think is the best. When people ask me one single book, I tell them Gita Srinath into that darkness. And of course, I see you nod because you know that is a brilliant book based on interviews with Franz Stangl conducted in the 1970s by Gita Srinath Stangl, who was the commandant of two killing centers, Sobibor and Treblinka.

who was also involved in the T4, Murder of People with Disabilities, and Serenny's book about him, for me, it was an inspiration of the kind of research that I wanted to conduct, like listening to him, but not taking at face value, finding others, including his wife, including Jewish survivors of Treblinka that she could talk to.

And she did that work in the 70s and early 80s. So, you know, there were a lot of people at bringing out the incredible complexity of, you know, that history. I think it's a brilliant book. I think it must have been Gerhard Weinberg who first recommended it to me. And, you know, I've been teaching courses about the Holocaust since 1990. Taught my first course at the University of Vermont.

And I believe I have used into that darkness in every course at some point, often the entire book. So yeah, if I got to suggest one book, I feel like it's a masterpiece of research. know, everything is in there. The role of the Vatican, know, stuff about like women in the uprising at Treblinka.

People think they discovered the stuff in their research now in 2025. Serenity had it in there, you know, 50 years.

Waitman Beorn (01:33:54.478)
Yeah, it's amazing. was asked the same question at Jamie Ashworth, is a Holocaust scholar over here and educator and knew about the podcast. And he turned my own question against me in London when I was talking to the Associated Jewish Refugees. And he said, what's your one book on the Holocaust? And I mentioned this one, you know, because one of the things that I had talked in a discussion of Holocaust litigography about sort of the

Doris Bergen (01:34:04.269)
Yes.

Doris Bergen (01:34:13.943)
You did also!

Waitman Beorn (01:34:22.796)
I think what is the goal, the sort of the overriding goal of a lot of, think certainly for me and a lot of us is to write that integrated history that Salfred Linder talked about, Where you have a multiplicity of voices and perspectives and it's all being told at the same time. And I think we're all still trying to do that. But I think as you point out, Guinness-Renny did it in the seventies already. She had sort of done this amazing study and that's...

And that's frankly just a great one. know, and again, it makes, makes me, I told, I told Jamie afterwards, I said, you know, it makes me kind of jealous for the scholars who were up and coming in the seventies when these people were still around and able, could go find them. You know, you didn't have to sign up sort of sift through the ashes of, of, their existence. But yeah, I mean, get us from these book is, is amazing. I mean, and the stuff she brings out, the gendered stuff, she doesn't, she doesn't really portray it as that, but it absolutely is, you know,

What would he have done if his wife had said, it's me or the concentration camps, you know, and, and yeah.

Doris Bergen (01:35:27.234)
mean, that scene where she asks his wife to raise her stonga, okay, I'm gonna ask you a question. I want you to think about it, you know, and then she says, What if you had said to him, you know, you can choose. You be the commandant, or you stay with me. And then when you know, Mrs. Stonga goes to lies down, she comes back, she's been crying. And she says to Serenity

My husband loved me more than anything. He would have done whatever I asked. And Serenny's like, thank you very much, her notebook, gets back to her hotel. And there is a telegram from Mrs. Stangl. She's like, what was I thinking? Of course I was powerless. I could have done nothing.

Waitman Beorn (01:36:00.374)
Yeah, I mean...

Waitman Beorn (01:36:10.966)
Yeah. mean, it just, it's brilliant. And as you say, I mean, even the religious piece, you know, she covers his religious stuff and like we, you know, for, for a podcast on chaplains and religion, you know, he, he sort of was very Christian and then decided he would say he wasn't, but you know, he was probably still Christian, you know,

Doris Bergen (01:36:29.102)
Yeah, no, I know. And then his wife, at one point, at least she says, she goes to a priest and she says, what should I do? You know, my husband is in the middle of this killing program. And the priest says to her, these are terrible times. I absolve him.

And the wife walks out of there, she's like, well, you know, and first she says something like, I felt the world was upside down. But then she's like, actually, that was the answer that I wanted. She doesn't say that, but no, the religion piece is brilliant.

Waitman Beorn (01:37:00.556)
Yeah.

I mean, good to go. Thank you. I got my absolution and amazing. Now I cannot think about it anymore. Well, on that happy note, I think we should probably close. Thank you so much for talking about this. To our listeners, got to go check this one out. It's really interesting. It covers lots of other things that I didn't get a chance to ask Doris about on the podcast that I might ask her afterwards. Again, if you're finding this engaging, a useful podcast, let me know however you like.

Passenger Pigeon or email or whatever, give us a like, subscribe, et cetera, et cetera. Once again, Doris, thank you so much for coming out and talking to us.

Doris Bergen (01:37:40.943)
Great to talk to you, Waidman.