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.

The armistice logic combined a short war, Britain’s rapid capitulation, and the quick conclusion of a Franco-Axis peace to liberate French POWs. “L’homme providentiel,” Pétain, was embraced as “a substitute for politics and a barrier to revolution.” The Armistice transferred responsibility for defeat to the Republic and its combat-shy “citizen soldiers,” liberated the professional army from the tyranny of the levée, and transformed surrender into a collective rather than individual act. Vichy wagered that collaboration would place France in a position to play a major role in Hitler’s New Europe. The three departments that comprised Alsace-Moselle were incorporated into the Reich. But it also sealed the status of France as a second-tier power. Despite the armistice and the fact that many French soldiers remained incarcerated in Germany, France retained considerable latent military power, that included a 100,000-man Armistice Army, roughly the same number in French North Africa, a considerable air force sans avions, and a significant navy. However, rather than prepare clandestinely for la revanche as many of its supporters believed, Vichy’s energies were directed into collaboration. A paramilitary Chantiers de la Jeunesse, designed to build the character so lacking in French youth, was stood up, as well as various organizations like the LVF that provided a vehicle for recruiting Frenchmen to serve in German forces. The armistice, not the British attack at Mers-el-Kébir, took Vichy and its navy down the path of collaboration.

Demonstrates that music was a vital part of the daily routines of those interned in prisoner of war camps. The forming of orchestras and theatrical revues were a popular way of passing the time and maintaining morale, but in many cases musical activities were used by prisoners of war to conceal attempts to escape. This chapter will give examples of how prisoners of war used music as a means of keeping up their morale to stave off feelings of ‘mouldiness,’ later identified as barbed wire disease.