4 - Saving Christianity, Killing Jews

Summary

Chapter 4 focuses on the months from June to December 1941. As the Germans and their Axis partners invaded Soviet territory, they carried out massacres of Jews, murdering hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children in open-air shootings. Chaplains accompanied the Wehrmacht in this period, too, as the regular military cooperated with SS killing squads. Along with violence against Jews and Soviet POWs, the German invasion brought widely publicized efforts to rescue Christianity from Communism. Central to that project was the reopening of churches that had been closed under Soviet rule. This chapter uses a set of photographs of the reopening of a church in Zhytomyr to analyze the linkage between saving Christianity and killing Jews and to understand how military chaplains fit into that equation. Chaplains were key figures in a narrative that recast German violence as a story of Christian redemption. Their reports and sermons rarely mention atrocities but they communicated awareness indirectly in ways that fixated on the Germans’ own suffering. This chapter uses Jewish sources to contextualize and understand German accounts without reproducing their erasure of the victims.