History keynote address discusses God and Hitler

The department of History welcomes Dr. Doris L. Bergen, a leading academic in Holocaust studies, to campus for the department’s annual keynote address, titled Between God and Hitler: German Military Chaplains in the Second World War, on March 20, at 7 p.m. in room H104.

Bergen’s lecture will discuss that about one thousand Christian clergymen, Protestant and Catholic, served as military chaplains in Hitler's Wehrmacht. They were present at every front and witnessed atrocities of all kinds: mass killings of Jews in Lithuania and eastern Poland; deliberate starvation of Soviet POWs; destruction of civilian villages in Byelorussia, Greece, and Italy. After the war, two chaplains even testified in the German trial of a murder squad responsible for the slaughter of thousands of Jews in Ukraine. Yet German military chaplains have been all but forgotten in accounts of World War II and the Holocaust. Who were these men? What roles did they play in facilitating, legitimating, recording, or perhaps opposing Nazi crimes? What do they reveal about how the Holocaust was possible?

The lecture is free of charge and all are welcome. A reception precedes the keynote address, from 5 – 7 p.m. in room H102.

Bergen is the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Chair in Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on issues of religion, gender, and ethnicity in the Holocaust and World War II and comparatively in other cases of extreme violence. Her books include Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (1996); War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (2003); The Sword of the Lord: Military Chaplains from the First to the Twenty-First Centuries (edited, 2004); and Lessons and Legacies VIII (edited, 2008). Bergen is a member of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.