Conscience? What Conscience?

Here is an academic with a peculiar message. Professor Doris Berger has studied her subject and she believes she has a new, never-explored vision on fascist Germany's military chaplains. As men of God they took their job seriously; to give aid and comfort to the troops. Their mission was to uphold their Christian beliefs and to encourage German soldiers to believe that God was on their side.

She is set to deliver a lecture at a synagogue in Toronto, entitled "Witness to Atrocity: German Military Chaplains and the Holocaust". Which is rather precious. But people make names for themselves as authorities on certain subjects with amazing regularity. Why not address the issue of military chaplains in the German military and the essence of their spiritual beliefs?

Chaplains were there for a specific purpose. To give comfort and assurance to the soldiers. If they were present, as emissaries of God and the Christian Church, then nothing that the German army did could be construed as morally offensive to God. "I'm an historian, not a judge. It's not my job to say they deserve to go to heaven, they deserve to go to hell. I'm not interested in that."

These were generally not hard-core Nazis, she observes, nor party members. They merely represented the German mainstream - and, presumably, the Zeitgeist of the time. Theirs was the compulsion in accepting that position with the German army, to lend legitimacy, to boost troop morale. In so doing, while they refrained from committing murder, they aided, they abetted.

The example used: a Nazi killing squad arrived in a small town for the purpose of killing all Jews. They began with the adults, were uncertain how to proceed with the 90 children, and locked them without food or water for several days in a schoolhouse. Two Wermacht soldiers were concerned at the sound of frantically weeping children. They approached their two chaplains who themselves went to the military commander, asking whether the children could be released. The commander contacted Berlin, and was ordered to kill the children. Which was done.

But this purported intervention, however tentative and meekly mild it was, could be interpreted, as far as the good professor is concerned - and possibly for the benefit of the book examining all such events that she could track - evidence of the consciences displayed by the two chaplains in question. Two members of their flock were upset, they responded. End of story.

German soldiers had the phrase "Gott mit uns" (God with us) engraved on their belt buckles. At that time in Germany 93% of Germans were baptized Christians. They regularly attended mainstream churches. The word of God was a comfort to the soldiers; Catholic chaplains could deliver the sacraments to their followers.

They did not use the Old Testament. It was a Jewish book. "Then they said Mary was a Roman." The Bibles they used and handed out contained only the Gospels. The Epistles of Paul were cut because Paul was a rabbi, an accursed Jew. Most inconvenient, and best avoided, given the circumstances.

In the course of her studies, Professor Bergen discovered a letter written directly to Hitler in 1935 from a pastor who lived in Luseland, Saskatchewan who wished to return to Germany, to serve the Nazi regime. As a Canadian of German extraction, whose Mennonite parents had emigrated from Ukraine to Saskatchewan, Professor Bergen has made the Holocaust the subject of her study.

She has produced a manuscript which was published as Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich.