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"During World War II, approximately 1,000 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"--

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.

Examining one of the defining events of the twentieth century, Doris L. Bergen situates the Holocaust in its historical, political, social, cultural, and military contexts. Including firsthand accounts from perpetrators, victims, and eyewitnesses, her book is immediate, human, and eminently readable.

Preconditions: antisemitism, racism, and common prejudices in early twentieth century Europe -- Leadership and will: Adolf Hitler, the National Socialist German Workers' Party, and Nazi Ideology -- From revolution to routine: Nazi Germany, 1933-1938 -- Open aggression: in search of war, 1938-1939 -- Experiments in brutality, 1939-1940: war against Poland and the so-called euthanasia program -- Expansion and systematization: exporting war and terror, 1940-1941 -- The peak years of killing: 1942 and 1943 -- Death throes and killing frenzies, 1944-1945

Central European History (CEH) was the first scholarly journal I really got to know, and for more than thirty years, it has been important to me in all kinds of ways. I first encountered CEH as a Master's student at the University of Alberta, where my primary supervisor was the extraordinary Annelise Thimme, author of highly original works on Hans Delbrück, Gustav Stresemann, and the Deutschnationale Volkspartei. The discipline of history was new to me, and although I had taken some interesting undergraduate classes on early modern and modern history at the Universities of Saskatchewan and Munich, I had no idea about historiography, professional networks, or academic publishing. I probably did not even understand what the term Central Europe meant.