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Kriegspfarrer an der Ostfront. Evangelische und katholische Wehrmachtseelsorge im Vernichtungskrieg, 1941-1945 . By Dagmar Pöpping . (Arbeiten zur Kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte, 66.) Pp. 275 incl. 16 ills. Göttingen : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht , 2017. [euro]70. 978 3 525 55788 4 ; 2198 140X
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Dagmar Pöpping's Kriegspfarrer an der Ostfront is the most recent contribution to a growing field whose contributors focus on the intersection of religious vocation, total war and genocide. What primarily distinguishes this work from those that immediately precede itￂ -ￂ namely, Martin Röw's 2014 study of German Catholic military chaplains as well as my own 2015 work on Catholic priests and the warￂ -ￂ is her attempt at a comparative study of the two Christian chaplaincies in the Wehrmacht, the Protestant and the Catholic. Such an endeavour is welcome. As she correctly notes, the two chaplaincies had much in common despite obvious distinctions, and the war created an environment 'that often pushed confessional differences into the background and encouraged a new, common association' among chaplains (p. 12). While she makes wide use of archival sources, the scope of Pöpping's analysis remains limited by what evidence has survived the war. The chief problem that this presents is that much of the official documentation about the Protestant chaplaincy was destroyed by bombs in 1943. Consequently her study, especially her examples, tends to be weighted in favour of the Catholic narrative.
Pöpping deploys her analysis in eight sections, dealing in turn with the organisation of the two wartime chaplaincies; the war on the Eastern Front; the roles that chaplains assumed; the socialising space created for chaplains by the war; the theology of death; conceptions of the enemy; wartime disenchantment and estrangement; and postwar tribulations and reflections. She offers some key statisticsￂ -ￂ 455 active chaplains for each confession on the eve of Operation Barbarossa, after which the number declined largely due to the regime's prohibition in 1942 on replacing those who fell or went missing (p. 20)ￂ -ￂ and underscores the importance of the chaplains' religious autonomy within the military (they reported to field bishops who were not part of the ecclesiastical structure of either denomination) as well as the support that they received from army officers. Both...