Catholic Priests and Seminarians As German Soldiers, 1935-1945
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Negotiating the Cross and the Swastika: Catholic Priests and Seminarians as German Soldiers, 1935-1945 ** approval of semi-final version By Lauren N. Faulkner B.A., Simon Fraser University, 2001 M.A., Simon Fraser University, 2003 A.M., Brown University, 2004 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History at Brown University Providence, Rhode Island May 2009 © 2009 by Lauren N. Faulkner This dissertation by Lauren N. Faulkner is accepted in its present form by the Department of History as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date____________________ _______________________________ Omer Bartov, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate School Council Date____________________ _______________________________ Deborah A. Cohen, Reader Date____________________ _______________________________ Abbott Gleason, Reader Date____________________ _______________________________ Doris L. Bergen, Reader Approved by the Graduate School Council Date____________________ _______________________________ Sheila Bonde, Dean of the Graduate School iii Curriculum Vitae Lauren Faulkner was born on May 2, 1979, in Richmond, British Columbia, Canada. She earned a B.A. at Simon Fraser University in 2001, an M.A. from Simon Fraser University in 2003 under the supervision of Martin Kitchen, and an A.M. from Brown University in 2004. She has a forthcoming article in Contemporary European History entitled “Catholic Priests as German Soldiers: Georg Werthmann and the Military Chaplaincy under the Third Reich.” She has taught an array of classes, including her own European History survey class at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008 and a seminar on Holocaust narratives. She was also involved for two years as a research assistant with the multidisciplinary and international project Borderlands: Ethnicity, Identity, and Violence in the Shatter-Zone of Empires Since 1848, co-directed by Omer Bartov at the Watson Institute for International Studies. She has been awarded a Humboldt University (Berlin) Exchange Fellowship, a Brown University Research Travel Fellowship, and a Brown University Dissertation Fellowship. In August 2009 she will begin her position as assistant professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. iv Acknowledgments In the course of eight years of graduate work, the first two done at Simon Fraser University and the last six completed at Brown University, I have accrued many debts to many people. Their help was instrumental in the completion of my dissertation; any faults therein are entirely my own. My advisor, Omer Bartov, has been ever ready to respond to emails and requests to read yet another draft; whether it was a minor detail or a major conundrum, he engaged my work and my ideas with empathy and fervor. His guidance has been an essential element to the final product on these pages. Tom Gleason and I slogged through some of the deeper moral dilemmas of my work over many a Kartabar lunch; he is much more than a reader, he is my dear friend. My long-distance readers, Deborah Cohen and Doris Bergen, provided me with wonderful critical feedback and unstinting support, even before they read my work. They are both models of inspiration for me. My professors at Brown have taught me rigor, grace, and the determination to strive always for the best of which I am capable. Many have gone out of their way to be of assistance, sometimes on short notice. I would like to extend an enormous thank you to the faculty at the University of Notre Dame who read drafts of my work; their feedback and enthusiasm was incredibly valuable. Special thanks are due to Gary Chamberlain, C.S.C., Kevin Spicer, C.S.C., and Brad Gregory. I have formed several friendships at Brown that I know will last a lifetime: thank you for your patience and your love, your willingness to laugh with me, your generosity with your time, and the constant spirit of camaraderie, without which these years would have been much more difficult. My family, especially my brother, my sister, and my parents, have lived with this dissertation as long as I have, and have engaged in my struggles with me, equipped with fortitude and an endless supply of encouragement and love. I dedicate my work to each of them, and to Jean-François, my conscience, my other half: I would not have made it without you. v Table of Contents Signature Page……………………………………………………………………………iii Curriculum Vitae…………………………………………………………………………iv Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………..v Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………vi Introduction……………………………………………………………………………….1 1. Negotiating Identity: German Catholics Between Nationalism and Religion………...14 2. Putting Volk and Fatherland First: The Party, the Army High Command, and the Catholic Church,1933-1945………………………………………………….76 3. Georg Werthmann and Pastoral Care in the Wehrmacht…………………………….134 4. Men of God Among Army Soldiers………………………………………………….187 5. Men of God As Army Soldiers………………………………………………………250 Conclusion: A Question of (Catholic) Souls…………………………………………...296 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………320 vi Introduction At the end of April 1945, an American infantry division apprehended three Germans wearing Wehrmacht uniforms in a monastery near Deggendorf, in eastern Bavaria. When the lieutenant-colonel dutifully filed his report on the incident, he explained that the three men in question were not officers, as he had initially presumed, but in fact clergymen – the acting Catholic field bishop Georg Werthmann, the head of the Catholic chaplaincy, and the two leading Protestant spiritual authorities in the military.1 The Americans kept them interned for the next several weeks at the monastery where they found them. Not surprisingly, given the fact that Germany had just lost the war and the full extent of the regime’s crimes was becoming known, Werthmann professed to have been a long-term, staunch opponent of National Socialist ideology and Hitler. When pressed as to why he had served in the army, Werthmann answered with conviction: “We felt that we could be of greater service if we remained outside [the] concentration camp [system]. But we never compromised our principles, or our souls. We have been persecuted ever since the Nazis came to power... And I know personally that if Germany had won this war there would have been no more clergy in Germany.” He seemed certain of this last potentiality, exclaiming, “the entire Church in Germany would have been dissolved… and that all clergymen, both Catholic and Protestant, would have been liquidated.”2 1 From the document collection “Sammlung Werthmann” in the Archiv des Katholisches Militärbischofsamtes Berlin (henceforth referred to as KMBA SW), 1009/VII (Nr. 1), copy of official report filed by John Cotter, 1 May 1945. 2 AKMB SW 1009/VII (Nr. 1), copy of Gregor Zimmer interview (English version); undated. 1 Such was the immediate post-war image of the Catholic Church’s relationship with National Socialism in Werthmann’s mind, an image of hardship and oppression about which he would never change his opinion. He was remarkably well placed to be able to tender such views on the subject: in 1936, he became second-in-command of the Wehrmacht chaplaincy when the Catholic field bishop appointed him field vicar-general; he was thirty-seven years old, and had been a priest for a mere twelve years. The ways in which he fulfilled his responsibility as one of the leaders of the Catholic chaplaincy required that he make sense of, negotiate with, and reconcile political realities of the time – in particular Nazi ideology – and the military circumstances of a brutal war with his own understanding of how his faith aided him in his work. The ways that he managed these three spheres (the temporal political and military spheres, and the spiritual sphere) had considerable influence in determining his outlook on the war and what his own experience meant. Most priest and seminarians who found themselves wearing army uniforms between 1939 and 1945 shared some version of this process of negotiation. It is one of the contentions of this dissertation that Werthmann was, in many ways, representative of the more than 17,000 German Catholic priests, theology students, and seminarians at different levels of study who were conscripted over the course of the war, and who engaged consistently in attempting not only to understand their wartime service, but to justify it fully. This kind of service, and the ways in which these men made sense of it, pose a series of questions about the nature of the relationship between Catholicism and Nazism, about pastoral care within and beyond the chaplaincy in a time of war, and about the justifications for such service. How did Germany’s Catholic priests and seminarians 2 make sense of Nazism before and after its rise to power in 1933? How did they negotiate their national and religious identities during the Third Reich? Were the two ever in conflict, and how were such conflicts resolved? To what extent was this negotiation influenced, molded, or guided by secular, military, or religious authorities, namely, the Nazi Party, the army high command, and the leadership of the Catholic Church in Germany? How did those priests and seminarians understand their role in the armed forces during the Second World War? What defined their experiences? How did other soldiers and their officers view them? Did the conditions of their wartime service affect their chosen vocation, their faith in God, or their general religious beliefs? How did they describe their service in the post-war period? To what extent did they condemn their own behavior or the behavior of fellow soldiers, or justify it? Such a topic reveals a significant gap in existing historiography – about the impact of Catholic priests and seminarians on the German war effort – and also brings together a number of themes in modern German history. Recent historians have only begun to develop the extant narrow field of work on German military chaplains during the Second World War.