Aus Feldpostbriefen junger Christen 1939–1945: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Katholischen Jugend im Felde (review)

On May 17, 1940, while advancing with his Wehrmacht unit in France, Johannes Niermann wrote in his diary: "The soldier knows not where, not when, not why. Knows only order. Does his duty—and that's it. The Christian does not see through the dark, knows not why God's will is different from the desire of his heart. But does the will of God—and that's it! It is not always so easy. And yet, soldier and Christian. The first has to be tough. The next even tougher" (p. 17). With great eloquence, Niermann, the former Reich leader of the Sturmschar, a disbanded group within the German Catholic Youth Movement, captured the dilemma he faced as a follower of Christ and a soldier in Germany's army. Niermann, however, was no stranger to such predicaments, since only a few years earlier he had continued his work in the Catholic Youth Movement, despite state prohibitions against it. Such "illegal" action cost him nine months in prison.

Niermann's words accentuate the central theme of Schleicher and Walle's documentary volume: the influence of Christianity on serving military men who had been members of the Catholic Youth Movement. Their volume collects and presents over three hundred letters sent primarily by Catholic German soldiers from the Front to either their former youth group chaplains or their parish priests. Some of these soldiers were seminarians whom the army had conscripted or who had volunteered for military service. Among the letter writers were even ordained clerics. Walle and Schleicher find that these Christian soldiers, formed deeply in their youth by Catholic moral values, share a perspective on the war much different from many of their "comrades." In his extended introduction, Heinrich Walle, a military historian and theologian, emphasizes that some, especially many who had been members of the Catholic Youth Movement, approached their military service from the perspective of Christian motivation. Though they "wanted to be German patriots," they viewed the war at the same time, as a "God-given challenge in which they wanted to prove themselves as Christians" (p. 20). The reader is directly reminded of this several times: in the foreword by Dr. Walter Mixa, the current German military bishop; in a second foreword by the editors; in Walle's introduction; and in commentary throughout the volume.

Schleicher and Walle have assembled their collection from three central archives: the Documentation Office for Church Youth Work (BDKJ), located in the Youth House Hardehausen near Paderborn; the archive of the Neudeutschland (New Germany) League in Cologne; and the archive of the Catholic Military Bishop's Office in Bonn. Many of the letters they chose originate from a collection assembled by the late Monsignor Johannes Böhner (to whom the authors dedicate their work), who was himself a member of the Youth Movement and, after ordination, a chaplain to its Cologne members. In addition to these collections, the editors conducted personal interviews to gain background on the authors.

According to Walle, he and Schleicher selected from a collection of over 3,000 letters. Despite the quantity of documentation, Walle admits that there are limits to the collection, especially the number of letter writers; he concedes that from these letters, it is "hardly possible to make quantitative statements about the moral views of the German soldiers in the Second World War." Still, he believes the letters do show that "soldiers of the Wehrmacht were in no way a monolithic bloc" (p. 25).

In his introduction Walle contextualizes the Catholic milieu from which these young soldiers came, while offering a general history of the Catholic Youth Movement. According to him, the legacy of the nineteenth-century Kulturkampf pushed German Catholics to embrace a "patriotism of a strongly nationalistic character" (p. 30). However, with the advent of the Weimar Republic and the promotion of new-found freedoms, many Catholics put behind them the...