By Lauren Faulkner Rossi
Between 1939 and 1945 greater than 17,000 Catholic German clergymen and seminarians have been conscripted into Hitler’s Wehrmacht. males who had dedicated their lives to God chanced on themselves advancing the reason for an abhorrent regime. Lauren Faulkner Rossi attracts on own correspondence, reputable army stories, memoirs, and interviews to offer an in depth photo of Catholic monks who served faithfully within the German defense force within the moment global warfare. such a lot of them didn't see the sour irony in their predicament.
Wehrmacht Priests plumbs the ethical justifications of fellows who have been dedicated to their non secular vocation in addition to to the reason for German nationalism. of their wartime and postwar writings, those squaddies frequently said frankly that they went to conflict willingly, since it was once their non secular responsibility to deal with their countrymen in uniform. yet whereas a few clergymen grew to become army chaplains, undertaking paintings in step with their non secular education, so much served in clinical roles or, when it comes to seminarians, regularly infantry. Their convictions approximately their responsibility in simple terms bolstered as Germany waged an more and more determined conflict opposed to the Soviet Union, which they believed used to be an existential risk to the Catholic Church and German civilization.
Wehrmacht Priests unpacks the advanced dating among the Catholic Church and the Nazi regime, together with the Church’s fierce yet futile makes an attempt to maintain its independence below Hitler’s dictatorship, its lodgings with the Nazis concerning religious care within the army, and the shortcomings of Catholic doctrine within the face of overall battle and genocide.
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Extra resources for Wehrmacht Priests: Catholicism and the Nazi War of Annihilation
Sample text
Not surprisingly, the clergy in Munich and the surrounding area were the first to concern themselves with the new player on the political scene. Munich, after all, was the birthplace of Nazism and the site of Hitler’s infamous failed putsch in 1923. 55 Church leaders viewed Nazism as one option among several, and not necessarily a viable one due to its extremism and its anti-Catholicism. Nonetheless, Nazism did not present the same kind of menace that they saw in Bolshevism. Such views of Nazism may seem naïve, but only in hindsight.
Their Catholic nature also encouraged their members to deepen their faith through frank spiritual and moral discussions with others their own age as well as with clerical leaders. They also took part in pilgrimages, both within Germany and to other destinations such as France. The Catholicity of many of these groups meant that they operated in relative segregation from non-Catholic youths; just as there was virtually no ecumenical dialogue between Catholic and Protestant clergy in Germany at this time, so too did youth groups of a clearly confessional nature tend to stick to themselves.
31 Leo XIII’s fi n-de-siècle charge against socialism moderated in the first two decades of the twentieth century. 32 In the wake of the Russian Revolution and through the chaos of the civil war that followed, Benedict XV and his successor, Pius XI, attempted to reach a private agreement with the Soviet state. From the end of the war through the 1920s, no explicit judgment of the socialist or communist movements, or the latter’s Russian variant, Bolshevism, came from the Holy See. 34 In Germany, bishops and Catholic lay leaders formed a chorus decrying in unflinching terms the assault on the Orthodox Church in Russia.