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 USA, Germany, Poland, Bosnia, and Kosovo.
Bergen applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Between God and Hitler: Military Chaplains in Nazi Germany, and reported the following:
On page 99, readers find themselves with the German military chaplains in defeated France in the late summer of 1940. Chaplains' reports, submitted up the chain of command, gave glowing accounts of their ministry during and after the invasion. Yet in the midst of the Wehrmacht's triumph, chaplains conveyed mixed messages. They were overworked, they complained, left with inadequate support to address the mental and physical needs of wounded soldiers. Although they were responsible for seeing to the proper burial of the dead, they lacked access to the vehicles and fuel that would allow them to do their job. Some chaplains' reports hinted that their superiors deliberately undermined them: without the means to reach the combat troops, they easily fell suspect to the charge of not really caring about the men. Meanwhile, chaplains also criticized the soldiers they served. When not fighting, they observed, most German soldiers behaved badly, plundering homes and cheating the locals. The chaplains were too few in number, they lamented, to stop the rot. Page 99 captures one key theme, but it is not representative of the book as a whole. The precarious situation of the Wehrmacht chaplains is important, and I argue that their insecurity about their place within the Nazi system is one of the reasons they tried so hard to prove their worth. But page 99 draws solely on sources produced by the chaplains themselves. Throughout the book, I complicate and interrogate chaplains’ narratives by providing other perspectives, for example, from Jews targeted in the German war of annihilation.Learn more about Between God and Hitler at the Cambridge University Press website.
My book is organized chronologically, and the chapter in which page 99 falls, on the conquests of Poland and France, is followed by the explosion of violence in the German assault on Soviet territory in 1941. That next chapter, titled "Saving Christianity, Killing Jews," analyzes chaplains’ direct encounter with the mass murder of Jews, including children, and the destruction of Soviet POWs and civilians. Chaplains’ acquiescence, their willingness to preach God’s unconditional love to the agents of genocide, was not an aberration. The habit of cooperation, going back to the early years of Hitler’s rule and deepened in the brutal attacks on Germany's neighbors in 1939 and 1940, proved hard to break, and the higher the stakes became, the less likely it was that chaplains would venture out of the ruts of their well-worn path. Page 99, with its quotidian grumblings from chaplains in occupied France, is part of the explanation why the Wehrmacht chaplains would continue to serve loyally, even after seeing fellow Germans burn villages along with their inhabitants in Greece, watching partisans be hanged in Yugoslavia, and witnessing mass shootings of Jews in Lithuania and Ukraine.
--Marshal Zeringue
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