This is the first of two snapshots – of Germany in 1945, when it became the hub of the largest migration movement of modern European times. The short snapshots consist of direct quotations from representatives of the key transmigrant, migrant, and immigrant groups and set the tone for the chapters that follow. In 1945 these were nearly 3 million soldiers of the Allied armies (Britain, France, United States, USSR); demobilized Wehrmacht soldiers; millions of ethnic German expellees from Eastern Europe who fled the advancing Red Army; 10 million Displaced Persons, especially liberated Allied POWs and forced laborers, mainly from Eastern Europe or the USSR, as well as survivors of the Nazi extermination and concentration camps; and 9 million German civilian evacuees who returned from the countryside to the urban centers. The snapshot highlights the conflicts between these groups, which brought perpetrators and victims in close contact; the fight for limited resources like food and housing in a largely destroyed Germany; and the pervasive sense of a devastated continent on the move.

Chapter 7, “Matters of Faith: Catholic Intelligentsia and the Church,” asks how Catholics behaved in Warsaw and why. Roman Catholicism was the religion of the majority of Varsovians and had played an important role in the development of the Polish national project. In the absence of a Polish government, the Church provided a potential locus of authority for Poles. Warsaw’s priests drew particular negative attention from the Nazi occupation for their potential influence and they were viciously persecuted, imprisoned, and often sent to the concentration camp at Dachau. Nevertheless, leaders of the Church, from the pope in Rome to local bishops, were hesitant to provide guidance, support Nazi occupation, or encourage opposition to it. Despite the lack of a top-down Catholic policy, this chapter argues that individual priests and lay Catholic leaders were motivated by their religious faith to form everything from charities to a postwar clerical state. Crucial among Catholics was the question of the developing Holocaust and the role of Polish Jews in Polish Catholic society, which sharply divided them.

For many Christians who had been in the camps, however, such squabbling among survivors missed the real meaning of the camp experience. For Jesuit Father Michel Riquet, a disciple of Jacques Maritain and a Mauthausen survivor himself, the Nazis were not so much fascists or totalitarians as they were latter-day pagans, who like the Egyptian pharaoh of old or the emperors of Rome had inflicted unspeakable cruelties on God’s children. These martyrs deserved memorializing, and Riquet led the fight to create just such a memorial, the Mémorial des martyrs de la Déportation on the Ile de la Cité just behind Notre-Dame Cathedral (where Father Riquet preached Easter sermons). It was inaugurated in 1962.