2 - The Summer of 1945: the Move to Germany

Summary

Members of the Religious Affairs staff of the Control Commission were not chaplains. In most cases they were not ordained. Some, at various times in the history of the organisation, were either serving or were ex-military personnel. However, by the time the Control Commission staff arrived in Germany in the summer of 1945 to start their work, one group of British clergymen had already been in the country for some months. Those were the chaplains serving in the Royal Army Chaplains’ Department (RAChD). The relationship between the two groups, army chaplains and Control Commission staff, and their respective tasks, would need to be clarified both at a central and at a local level to ensure that the work of both organisations was not compromised. This chapter looks at some of the ways in which the relationships came to be defined in that first summer of the Commission's operation.

The RAChD of 1945 was different from that of World War One and different again from the modern chaplaincy service in the British army. Following a reorganisation in 1920, all chaplains, except for those from the Catholic Church, came under a single administrative structure. The Catholics had felt unable to join an organisation which would be headed by an Anglican. They thus belonged to a parallel organisation within the army. The larger ‘unified’ Department, as it was known, had worked reasonably well during World War Two. It was this organisation that administered the approximately 290 chaplains from the Church of England, Church of Scotland, other Presbyterian churches, the Methodist Church, and chaplains appointed by the United Board from Congregational, Baptist, and other smaller denominations who in the summer of 1945 were serving in Germany. The RAChD in 2nd Army, the largest British formation in 21 Army Group (21 AG) was under strength by some thirty chaplains. Many of those serving had been with their units since the Normandy landings in June 1944. They were led by the Revd J. W. J. Steele, the Assistant Chaplain General of the 2nd Army. In the arcane structure of the RAChD he held the rank of Chaplain to the Forces Class 1, ranking for military purposes as a Colonel.