Dmitri Donskoi

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religion. The attitude all religious traditions should adopt towards war has always been a contentious and divisive topic, and the Second World War proved to be no exception. The circumstances in which war should be supported, or whether it should ever be supported, had been a matter of public debate in western Europe, in particular, ever since the First World War. The extent to which the churches had almost without exception, endorsed national aims in that conflict subsequently became a matter for regret amongst Christian leaders. A commitment to ‘peace’ became a much more prominent aspect of church life, particularly in the English-speaking world. In England, Dick Sheppard, Charles Raven, and Donald Soper were among those who had declared they would never support any war. In the mid-1930s, the ‘Christian Pacifist’ option appeared likely to be a substantial section of opinion. Archbishops and bishops, who would not go so far, nevertheless made it clear that peace was so highly prized that every attempt should be made to preserve it. Pacifism, whether ‘hard’ or ‘soft’, probably had a greater impact on the British churches than on those of any other European country. It grew out of a Dissenting tradition but now incorporated episcopal members of the House of Lords. Yet by 1939 it was not as potent a factor as had been anticipated. The events of 1938, coupled with an increasing awareness of the nature of Nazism, led many in the churches to feel that war, even if not necessarily ‘just’ according to traditional doctrine, was nevertheless justified. In consequence, when war came, there was no major cleavage between the majority of church members and government. The pacifist option was followed by only a small minority (see conscientious objectors).

However, there was a determination, on the part of both Anglican and Free Church leaders, not to repeat some of the crude statements allegedly made by their predecessors in 1914–18. Paradoxically, it was not easy to maintain the stance of solid but restrained support because it seemed self-evident, at least in 1940, that the war was a struggle to preserve Christian civilization from a National Socialism which was profoundly anti-religious. The inter-war period had seen the tentative development of a (Protestant) ecumenical movement. A celebrated conference on Church, Community, and State, held in Oxford in 1937, had brought together many leaders to discuss these issues. Organizationally and institutionally it was still fragmentary, but an extensive network of supra-national personal contacts had been built up. Church leaders did not want the objectives of the war to become simply national. There was a place in British church life for Christians exiled from Germany. The concept of Christian civilization had a wide appeal, extending beyond those in active membership of any of the churches. It was a term to be found on the lips of a prime minister not otherwise conspicuous for his Christian devotion.

Identification with the term even made possible a degree of collaboration between Roman Catholics and other Christians. Momentarily, in 1940, in the wake of events in France and the establishment of the Vichy regime, there had been a suspicion, even in high places, that British Catholics were not altogether loyal. The fact that Eire had decided to remain neutral engendered a certain suspicion, for it was known that there were many Catholics there. The government of Northern Ireland found itself in a good position to play the Protestant card, particularly when the geographical location of the province became of increasing importance. In the event, notwithstanding the fact that Catholics clearly did not identify the USSR with the defence of Christian civilization, they did not dissent from the view that Hitler had to be defeated. The dean of Canterbury, Hewlett Johnson, took the Soviet Union and Christian civilization to be synonymous, but that was extreme. There was, nevertheless, a drift in the churches, as the war progressed, towards the left. William Temple, archbishop of Canterbury 1942–4, was a member of the Labour Party and his best-selling Christianity and Social Order ( 1942) reasserted Christianity's claim to have a prophetic public role.

Prominent though Temple was, the most notable British religious figure was George Bell, bishop of Chichester, a man with wide international and ecumenical sympathies. His willingness to speak publicly against the policy of area bombing earned him both admiration and enmity in public life. Germany had to be defeated, but it mattered how. Perhaps more than any other figure, he summed up the determination of the British churches, as expressed through prominent figures, to support the war and yet to maintain a certain critical distance. Naturally, there were some who thought the emphasis erred in one direction and others who thought it erred in the opposite direction. One element in this stance was also an awareness of the distance between church life and the concerns and beliefs of the population at large. Service padres during the First World War had realized this at first hand. Chaplains in the Second World War tended to be both more circumspect and sympathetic in their responsibilities. In short, Christian civilization was a capacious category and there was an awareness in many quarters, though perhaps not on the part of Temple's successor, Geoffrey Fisher, that the religion of the British people, as it found expression in the war, did not fit securely and simply into the ecclesiastical or theological categories of the mainline churches.

The generally subdued symbiosis of religion and war which developed in the UK could not be found so readily in other parts of Christian Europe. Hitler's early sponsoring of something called ‘practical Christianity’ seemed disappointing in its fruits. His sapping of Protestant Christianity had proved extremely divisive in the churches. That there was opposition to him in the churches cannot be doubted, but its basis was not constant. For some, opposition was only justified if there was direct interference in internal ecclesiastical affairs. For others, as the regime consolidated itself, a more wide-ranging and political opposition was justified. Attitudes on these issues reflected highly elaborate Lutheran notions of the respective spheres of church and state. On the Roman Catholic side, the broad strategy had been to try to preserve an institutional life for the church by formal agreements. ‘German Christians’ emerged who claimed to be able to synthesize the best of National Socialism and the best of Christianity. Many Christians seemed able to reconcile themselves to at least certain aspects of anti-Semitic legislation. Those who could not, like Martin Niemöller and the archbishop of Münster (who opposed the euthanasia programme), often ended up in concentration camps. Many young people had little interest in abstruse theological debate and preferred the religion of the open air.

The war of 1939 therefore produced in Germany a wide variety of reactions, public and private. It was difficult to believe that a victory for Hitler would advance the cause of Christianity. It was equally difficult to believe that the defeat of Germany was desirable. It was almost impossible to believe that the churches had a positive duty to contribute to that defeat. Pacifism, while not absent from the churches, had often been seen as ‘Anglo-Saxon’, a product of an emphasis on the ‘Social Gospel’ not congenial in the theological climate in Germany in the 1930s. When the USSR was invaded in June 1941 (see BARBAROSSA), many anguished Christians serving in the Wehrmacht began to feel a little more comfortable about supporting a war that now included the overthrow of godless communism. However, Hitler himself had largely abandoned the notion that he could enlist the Catholic Church in the front line against Bolshevism. It was difficult for Christians to know whom to trust. Anti-Nazi pastors had often been vehemently critical of the Versailles settlement in the past. The war could not be supported unreservedly but neither could Germany's enemies. Pre-war friends tried clandestinely to reach out across the chasm, as when George Bell met Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Stockholm. These were brave gestures, but power lay elsewhere. Pre-war enemies delicately came together in small groups. Christians and Socialists whistled together in the dark. Protestants and Catholics, sundered in the past by political and theological divides, tried to find common ground. Such encounters were always difficult and incarceration was always a possibility. True believers, it seemed, had returned to the catacombs. The most difficult question of all eventually had to be faced. Was it right to take part in an opposition which could have as its objective the assassination of Hitler? The July plot of 1944 (see Schwarze Kapelle) is evidence that some Christians did reach that conclusion. They had to pay the price, either immediately or subsequently. There was also a nagging anxiety. If Hitler was killed, would the German people support a Christian peace?

Here and there, too, individuals displayed heroism in helping all men and women in danger—Christians, Socialists, or Jews. It is not surprising that they were the exceptions. At another level, Roman Catholic bishops and Evangelical church leaders still struggled to maintain some semblance of ‘normality’ in the institutional life of their respective churches. It might be that otherwise Christianity would simply disappear. Cardinal Bertram, president of the conference of bishops and the last prince bishop of Breslau, felt it his duty to congratulate the Führer every year on the occasion of his birthday. When he heard, after Hitler's suicide on 30 April 1945, that the Führer had fallen at his command post in the Reich Chancellery, fighting against Bolshevism to his last breath, the cardinal ordered a solemn requiem to be held throughout his archdiocese in memory of the Führer and all those who had fallen in the struggle for the German Fatherland. In his prison cell, Dietrich Bonhoeffer meditated on what he thought the war was teaching the Christians of Germany. It would be impossible simply to reinhabit the old structures as though nothing had happened. He offered some tantalizing thoughts on ‘religionless Christianity’ for the survivors to puzzle over.

Elsewhere in western and central Europe, neither the British nor the German situation could be precisely repeated. In the mainly Protestant countries of northern Europe—Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands—German conquest produced a profound shock, particularly since they had all been neutral in the First World War. In Lutheran Scandinavia, Germany had been the cultural and theological home of church leaders. In this unexpected situation should they collaborate and seek what terms they could for their churches? Should they identify with governments-in-exile, where these existed? Should they become de facto the embodiment of national resistance in the absence of the customary institutions? Was it really the job of churches to be so political? But on the other hand, it was undoubtedly the case that they were national churches, virtually coextensive with the population at large. That justified such involvement, indeed it perhaps required it if the church leaders were to retain credibility. Should they simultaneously seek some kind of international mediating role between the UK and Germany with a view to bringing the war to an end? Sweden, close at hand, might facilitate such an enterprise. To these questions there were, inevitably, different answers. To be even more precise, there were different answers from the same people at different times. In the gloom of 1940 things looked different from the picture in 1944. Church leaders wrestled with the balance between prudent pragmatism and what they believed to be moral imperatives. Calvinists in the Netherlands had substantially the same problems but the context of their occupation was not quite the same. In addition, unlike in Scandinavia, historic Catholic/Calvinist differences did not make it possible to mobilize a national/church resistance. We should not ignore, either, sections of the population, among them some church members, for whom the idea of participating as equal partners in the ‘New European Order’ had attractions.

In Catholic Europe some similar but also some different issues arose. Church and state were separated in France and the clerical/anti-clerical divide had remained a constant aspect of the politics of the Third Republic. In 1940, there was a disposition in high clerical circles and among some bien-pensants to regard the catastrophe of the fall of France in June 1940 as a judgement upon that regime. The spiritual decadence which the Third Republic had embodied had to be remedied. The German victory was not in itself to be welcomed but an opportunity was now to hand in the new regime of Vichy, underpinned by the ideology of Charles Maurras and other right-wing Catholics, to make a fresh start. The Papal nuncio discovered ‘the Pétain miracle’. The only blemish on Pétain, apparently, was his 21-year marriage to a divorcée, but ways and means were happily found to legitimize the union. It looked to many as though the regeneration of agriculture and Catholicism could go together. It is true that the initial paeans of praise about Pétain's regime in French clerical circles gave way, subsequently, to more restrained comment and even criticism. The fact that Strasbourg cathedral had been turned into a war museum seemed a little premature, even to the Vichy episcopate, but it is worth noting that even in the spring of 1944 it was the judgement of French cardinals and archbishops that resistance constituted ‘terrorism’. Yet that is not the whole story. More than a thousand priests were deported by the Nazis and some individual bishops were very critical of the Vichy regime. The Protestant minority in the south was not enamoured of the trappings of clerical restoration. It had a certain tradition of fighting in hostile terrain and some of its members revived that link (see maquis). Those Catholics who disliked ‘Vichy Catholicism’ noted that Charles de Gaulle went regularly to Mass. The massive deportation of Jews in the summer of 1942 was the first issue on which bishops (of Toulouse and Lyons, for example) openly opposed the regime. Country priests often helped shot-down airmen, and others, who were trying to evade capture, for many were anti-Nazi. The abbé in north-eastern France who sat under his church tower with a sten gun concealed in the folds of his soutane, while an SOE wireless operator used the tower for a transmission, was only an extreme instance of the general attitude among many of them.

Mussolini did not go regularly to Mass but Italy was a Catholic country. The Lateran Accords of 1929, which regulated the relations between two sovereign states, Italy and the Vatican, also defined their rights in educational and spiritual matters. Within a few years, Mussolini had been given the papal Order of the Golden Spur and relations between the Vatican and Italy seemed better than at any time since the creation of the Italian state. Papal pronouncements concerning the war in Abyssinia in 1935–6 had been Delphic. The League of Nations, based in Geneva of all places, had been viewed with suspicion. However, bishops and clergy could be found in 1935 who gave thanks that they were alive at such an epic moment in Italian history. Perhaps 1940 was not quite such an epic moment, but it was inconceivable that the church could have stood out against Italian intervention in the war. Obedience to the state in time of war was ordained by God and was a religious duty. The Pope, Pius XII, unable to prevent war or persuade the belligerents to negotiate, struggled to retain a sort of detachment in the precarious enclave which was the Vatican. Given that the Pope was Italian and the weight of the Italian presence in the Curia, it was inevitable that the fate of the church in Italy should be close to their hearts—but it had to be subordinated to the needs of the church as a whole.

Vatican diplomacy confronted two nasty phenomena: German National Socialism and Soviet communism. It was open to persuasion that the former was the immediate danger, but had little doubt that the latter was the long-term danger. Was there a path between Scylla and Charybdis? There were regimes, ‘Catholic regimes’, which purported to be steering such a course. Josef Tiso (1887–1947), the man most responsible for the creation of ‘independent’ Slovakia, was a Catholic priest. There had been some relief, in 1939, that the Slovaks had escaped from the Hussite clutches of Prague. Yet the regime Tiso presided over in wartime was oppressive. It was not difficult for Protestants and non-Christians to suppose that the Vatican favoured nominally independent, clerico-fascist regimes which followed the path of collaboration as a way of avoiding the two unpleasant threats, and they were not persuaded that this new phenomenon was an improvement. The situation in erstwhile Yugoslavia gave them more ammunition. That country's defeat in April 1941 was probably looked upon by most Croats as an opportunity to escape from what had been a Serbian-dominated state. The establishment of the Independent State of Croatia by the Ustaša leader Ante Pavelić was welcomed by the Catholic Church. Over the coming years this step triggered off a series of vicious and bloody events whose consequences in turn triggered further vicious and bloody events 50 years later. It was the unsurprising conviction of the Catholic bishops that the Catholic Church was the true church and that Orthodox Christians were schismatics. Conversions were to be welcomed. To the dismay of at least some of the bishops, a reign of terror began. Killings took place on a vast scale. Precise figures remain in dispute and so, also, do attributions of responsibility. It would be a mistake to suppose that the scene was witnessed with satisfaction by all church leaders. However, the fact remains that whether in Zagreb or in Bosnia-Hercegovina, emotions ran so deep that national, cultural, and religious allegiances could not be disentangled. The ‘European’ and ‘Catholic’ world (as Croats perceived it) clashed with the ‘Byzantine’ and ‘Orthodox’ world. There could be no quarter. To suppose that ‘religion’ was the primary cause of these conflicts would be as naïve as the claim by religious leaders that they could detach themselves, either at the time or later, from the evil consequences of what they supposed to be desirable ecclesiastical objectives.

Elsewhere in the Balkans, and in central Europe, the various fascist occupations resulted in a patchwork of persecution and indifference. Generally speaking, the Italians were less zealous than the Nazis, though ugly campaigns were inflicted on both the Muslims of Albania and the Orthodox of Greece. In Hungary, pre-war religious life, including Judaism, was able to continue until the German occupation of March 1944. In Romania, the Iron Guard preserved the Romanian Orthodox Church, whilst persecuting the religious minorities.

Echoes of Europe's religious–political conflicts were not absent in the USA where, locally or nationally, the Protestant churches or the Roman Catholic Church reached back into a particular aspect of the European past. Yet it all seemed very far away. In the wake of the First World War, and after the débâcle of the Versailles settlement of 1919, the main thrust of American Christianity was American. The mainline Protestant denominations were able to combine a fairly comfortable pacifism with the knowledge that the USA would not be involved in a war again anyway. A theologian and political commentator of the stature of Reinhold Niebuhr, who combined a knowledge of the European scene with a firm conviction that the Christian church could not be pacifist, was a rarity. The fact that the USA was drawn into the conflict as a result of Pearl Harbor made the mobilization of Christian America more straightforward. It offered full scope for what critical commentators called the religion of the American way of life. Notwithstanding the formal separation of church and state, the entire community seemed to subscribe to Judaeo-Christian values, however they might be embodied in any particular church. Such subscription existed alongside an apparently deep divide between Protestants and Catholics. The fact that, from the American viewpoint, the war was occasioned by Japan made it possible for all Christians, from the president downwards, to hope that God would bless America. It was equally the fact, however, that wily Europeans had succeeded in persuading Washington that Europe came first. Roosevelt had already explained to the Pope that the survival of the USSR would be less dangerous to religion, to the church as such, and to humanity in general, than would the survival of what he called the German form of dictatorship. The Pope declined the suggestion that he might associate himself with the signatories of the Atlantic Charter, though it is conceivable that he would have been impressed by the hymn-singing which accompanied its signature. The arrival of US forces in North Africa in November 1942 and then on continental Europe caused some surprise in the extent to which ordinary GIs did not seem inhibited in talking about and to God. Cynical Europeans dismissed American ‘religiosity’. Was it, they wondered, really important that Eisenhower's parents were devout members of the River Brethren, a small puritan sect? But as US troops encountered at first hand the godlessness, or the intractable ethnic-religious-political conflicts, of old Europe, they suspected that a dose of straightforward new world religion would be no bad thing.

The war began in ‘Christian Europe’. It was waged world-wide largely by countries which conceived themselves to be, or were perceived by non-Christian communities to be, in a general sense Christian. Chaplains were on hand to encourage, console, and bury. Services in the desert or the jungle were the order of the day. Not for nothing was the victor of El Alamein the son of the bishop of Tasmania. But he was also the grandson of the lieutenant-governor of the Punjab and British Christian soldiers knew from long experience in the Middle East and India that the religious beliefs and traditions of Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus had to be treated with respect and care. There was always the possibility, too, that the configuration of the conflict might produce situations in which leaders of non-Christian religions might seek to exploit the discomfort of the Christians.

In this respect, however, there was no direct repetition of the problems posed by the Ottoman Empire in the First World war. Although the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hadj Amin el Husseini, did his best, there was no figure in the Axis camp with whom Muslims could identify in the way some had identified with the Caliph in the earlier conflict. Nevertheless, from an Islamic perspective, the war was an alien imposition fought by outsiders on territory which was part of the Umma of Islam. Problems for the British might enable Arabs—Christian or Muslim—to gain the upper hand against Jews in Palestine. Both in Iraq and in Egypt, there were sections of Islamic opinion who saw that there might be an opportunity to evict the British Christians. How far, if at all, the circumstances warranted or made feasible a jihad or holy war was another matter. In the event, no permanent eviction did take place. The same broad situation existed in India. Here, unlike the Middle East, the explicit use of any religious rallying-cry against the British Raj was likely to prove two-edged, given the religious complexity of the Indian subcontinent. It was as likely to turn Muslim against Hindu as to turn both against the government. Martial Sikhs would not stand idly by. There were already enough signs of the depth of the religious divide which was ultimately to lead to partition. In the event, the British were able to maintain the Indian Army intact as a multi-religious agglomeration. Indeed, the way in which Muslims, Brahmins, other Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, and Christians all fought—and ate—together in a communal struggle against a common enemy, irrespective of doctrinal differences, is an interesting, probably unexampled, instance of religious toleration in wartime. Even so, by the end of the war, it was evident that some regiments and their commanders were already positioning themselves for an anticipated internal conflict. Earlier in the war, too, the British were able to take advantage of the fact that their defeat might only precipitate an India under Nazi hegemony. Gandhi was nevertheless prepared to press his ‘Quit India’ campaign but did so in the knowledge that another outside power might not be so relatively tolerant of his own religious ideas and the political strategies which stemmed from them.

The extent to which Christianity straddled the war, modifying or reinforcing national struggles in particular circumstances, has already been noted. In the case of Japan religion reinforced the national struggle without the restraint of a universalistic aspiration. The nationalistic appeal of Shinto—which treated the emperor as God, a man directly descended from the Sun Goddess—had helped the cohesion of Japan during its remarkable adaptation and modernization over the previous 50 years. Shinto reinforced already strongly-established national notions of spiritual discipline and physical fitness. The reverence extended to swords, spears, bows, and arrows as symbols of fighting gods did not promote pacifism. Buddhism, which in previous decades had suffered from Shinto intolerance, revived to some extent, though it, too, had a strongly nationalist tone. Small Protestant and Roman Catholic minorities, some 300,000 out of a population of about 80 million, stood at the margins of society, though they were not without influence. Japan therefore appeared to present the most complete example of the religious underpinning of a national effort in war. It was a unity which was frequently criticized outside Japan. There was, then, a certain irony in the fact that it was the ‘Christian’ west which dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When the full implications of that action became apparent, it led Christian theologians increasingly to criticize any attempt to ‘Christianize’ the west.

In eastern Europe, religious life was subjected to a series of ordeals that were far more severe than anything experienced in the west. At the outset, both atheistic communism and pagan fascism might have been considered equally hostile to religion. In practice, the pattern of persecution proved to be extremely capricious. Soviet conduct, in particular, turned out to be inconsistent. In 1939–41, the USSR was still in the grip of militant atheism. In the countries occupied by the Red Army at that time, vicious purges took place against religious leaders of all faiths. The Uniate Church in eastern Poland (western Ukraine) was banned. Large numbers of pastors, priests, and rabbis were deported to the GUlag together with believers. In principle, no religious congregation was permitted to exercise an independent role within the community. However, the German–Soviet war persuaded Stalin to revise his stance towards religion (see below for religion in the USSR). In consequence, when the Red Army returned to Poland in 1944–5, milder polices were often pursued. The Uniate Church, which had enjoyed a brief resurgence under German occupation, was suppressed once again. But elsewhere, the Soviet authorities were more concerned to force compliant clergy to co-operate, than to destroy them wholesale.

On the other hand, the Nazi authorities treated the Roman Catholic Church in Poland with unbridled hostility from the start. During the Polish campaign of September 1939, Luftwaffe pilots were specifically ordered to bomb and to strafe churches. On 3 February 1940 the Governor-General, Hans Frank, noted in his diary: ‘The Church is the central assembly point of the Polish spirit…I know myself that (it) is the deadly enemy of all Germans in the country.’ As a result, the church was reduced to the status of an informal association, directly administered by a department of the SS.

Initially, the heaviest blows fell on the districts, such as the so-called Wartheland, which were directly incorporated into the Reich with a view to immediate Germanization. The vast majority of parish churches were closed, and their property seized. All seminaries were disbanded. Polish religious art was systematically profaned or became loot. The higher clergy were arrested en masse. The lower clergy, when not murdered on the spot, were often sent to concentration camps: more than 1,500 Polish priests died in Dachau alone and all the monks of the national shrine at Jasna Gora in Częstochowa perished in Auschwitz. By the end of 1941, the US State Department reported that only 34 priests out of 828 were left in the archdiocese of Posen. A year later, only 2 churches out of 50 were open for worship in the city of Łódź. The Polish primate, Archbishop Hlond of Gniezno, fled abroad and remained in exile in Rome.

The Catholic Church escaped more lightly in the rump of Poland known as the General Government (see Poland, 2(b)). There, priority was given to the destruction of Jewry and Judaism (see Final Solution); and time ran out before Nazi plans for the Catholic population could be implemented. Almost all the synagogues were burned or otherwise demolished. The Great Synagogue on Tomicka Street in Warsaw, the Polish capital's largest religious building, was dynamited in May 1943. St John's Cathedral met the same fate at the end of 1944. The cardinal-prince of Cracow, Adam Sapieha, was not removed, even when he served Governor Hans Frank a plate of cold porridge, but 8,500 out of 14,000 priests were arrested, of whom roughly half perished. In Distrikt Galizien, the Ukrainian Uniate Church was allowed to revive, subject to supervision; and a few confiscated Catholic churches were handed over to the small Orthodox community. Overall, only an estimated 10% of Polish churches stayed open throughout the war.

The reaction of the Polish church to Nazi and Soviet terror was mixed. The hierarchy, broken by arrests and dismayed by the passivity of the Vatican, had little option but to collaborate. The surviving clergy, however, often worked closely with the Polish Home Army (see Poland, 4) and other resistance movements, strengthening the bond with the common people that became manifest in the post-war years.

In many parts of eastern Europe, as in the Balkans, national identity was defined by religious allegiance. As a result, hatreds aroused by wartime tensions could sometimes drive smouldering ethnic rivalries into open religious warfare. Some of the worst atrocities (apart from those committed in Croatia) were in Volhynia and western Ukraine, where in 1943–4 tens of thousands of Catholics and Poles were murdered by Ukrainian nationalists. In the USSR the Russian Orthodox Church emerged with vigour from the penumbra of state atheism. Reflecting later on the events of the 1940s, a Russian Christian wrote, ‘In the old days our army carried its standard into battle with the cry, “For God and the Tsar” you never heard anyone in the Great Patriotic War cry, “For atheism and Stalin”.’ In truth, the German invasion of June 1941 (see BARBAROSSA) caused not only a cessation of persecution, but a temporary reversal of Stalin's plan to eliminate the church.

By 1939 this plan had been substantially implemented. Only a handful of churches were open on Soviet territory, four powerless bishops remained in place, the vast majority of clergy were in prison or had been murdered. Religious vitality existed only in the most secret places of an underground church. Yet from 1941 Stalin became almost a patron of the Russian Orthodox Church, while the third of his former subjects who fell temporarily under German occupation promoted a religious revival of remarkable proportions.

One of the mysteries of the German–Soviet war is how the head of the church, Metropolitan Sergei (there was no longer a patriarch), managed to call the Soviet people to a defence of the motherland in a radio broadcast on the very day of the invasion, while Stalin remained silent for a further ten days. Churches began to reopen in many places, with clergy emerging from the catacombs or prison. The church raised the enormous sum of 150 million roubles for the defence fund, equipping the ‘Dmitri Donskoi’ tank brigade (called after a medieval Christian hero) and a comparable wing of the air force. In the depth of the war ( July 1942) the church even managed to produce a lavish volume of 457 pages extolling its own position and glossing over Stalin's persecution.

Nor was all propaganda. Metropolitan Alexi showed immense personal fortitude in staying with the faithful throughout the 900 days of the siege of his city of Leningrad. There can be no doubt that the church sustained national morale at a time of desperate need.

Stalin gave the church its official reward on 4 September 1943. The aged Metropolitan Sergei returned from Ulyanovsk on the Volga, whither the regime had sent him for his safety. Stalin received him with the few other available senior hierarchs in the Kremlin and a concordat resulted. The patriarchate was restored, with the enthronement of Sergei eight days later. A theological course began in Moscow the next year and it became possible to publish a journal again, albeit under heavy censorship.

Patriarch Sergei died in May 1944. The enthronement of his successor, Metropolitan Alexi, early the next year was attended even by some foreign dignitaries, such as Cyril Garbett (1875–1955), the archbishop of York, who undertook a hazardous journey to demonstrate his church's solidarity. The Russian Orthodox Church was to hold these concrete gains for fifteen years after the war.

In German-occupied territory events moved swiftly. With the removal of the immediate constraints of Stalin's persecution, there was no region which did not experience a religious revival of major proportions. Ukraine was a special beneficiary and it is not surprising that oppressed Christians often welcomed the Germans as liberators who allowed them to restore their lost heritage. This alleged ‘collaboration’ was unfairly used right up to the age of glasnost to attach a stigma to both Orthodox and Uniates.

Before the revolution, the area from St Petersburg west to Pskov had been an Orthodox stronghold, but Stalin had turned it into an ecclesiastical desert. Following the German invasion, it experienced an astonishing religious revival under Metropolitan Sergi (Voskresensky), who was eventually to be murdered in April 1944 in obscure circumstances, either by the Germans or by Stalin's agents. Before this he had led the ‘Pskov Spiritual Mission’ which saw the reopening of churches everywhere and the gathering of tens of thousands of the faithful every time the liturgy was celebrated. The occupying power even permitted the teaching of religion in schools.

Captured German war archives confirm these facts, but also illustrate that it was not the ultimate policy to gain the allegiance of the people by restoring religious liberty. Indeed, in many places the Germans handled this clumsily and ineffectively. Hitler wanted to bar the churches in the newly occupied lands from playing any political role; he wanted to remove any Soviet influence, which in practice meant helping Ukrainian nationalist church movements financially; and Christian influence was to be reduced by banning any national religious structures. These policies would prepare for the eventual destruction of the churches after the war.

Such was the strength of the religious revival that these policies failed and as the war turned against the Germans they had ever less time to pay attention to such complicated and subtle matters as controlling church life.

As the Red Army drove west towards the end of the war, the Soviets regained territories where the church had made a significant recovery from the devastation of the 1930s. Beyond this, in the lands which had never been Soviet—or only briefly so after the Nazi–Soviet Pact of August 1939 (western Ukraine, western Belorussia, the Baltic States, Bessarabia)—there were richly flourishing churches (Byzantine Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans) which had hitherto escaped persecution altogether.

It is one of the ironies of the Second World War that its end found a much more flourishing Christian church on Soviet soil than its beginning.

In all these circumstances no easy audit of religion and the war is possible. Despite some alleviation of the position of churches in the USSR, few were in any doubt that the Stalinist regime remained fundamentally hostile to religion—whether Christianity or Islam. The victory over Nazism in Europe was not therefore a simple one for ‘religion’ against ‘irreligion’. Nevertheless, as the full extent of Nazi atrocities became apparent, there was talk of a Christian counter-attack to redeem Europe from its apostasy. ‘Christian Democracy’ was one solution, though horror at what had been done by those without religion was tempered by the knowledge of what had also been done in the name of religion. Acts of compassion and mercy were matched by acts of intolerant fanaticism. The universalist claims and aspiration of both Christianity and Islam existed side by side with the reality of ethnic animosity and inter-state conflict. Stalin's brutal question, ‘How many divisions has the Pope?’ pointed to the fact that the pontiff could only play a hand that was powerless, as the world seemed to understand power.

But perhaps it was not only world Christianity that was powerless to prevent war or end its horrors. What did the conflict say about the power of God? It was a question brought into acute focus by the Final Solution and has had an enduring resonance among both Christian and Jewish theologians ever since. What kind of God ‘allowed’ such things to happen? How could the Holocaust be reconciled with notions of God as omnipotent? For unbelievers such questions were meaningless, though it left them looking starkly at a picture of mankind with a capacity for evil which called into question the optimism of the Enlightenment. Christian believers looked more intensely at the picture of a man on a Cross. The capacity to reconcile emerges from a willingness to suffer. Whatever answers might be returned, the questions pointed to a deepening of debate about God, the human race, and the world, taking it far beyond any simple notion that the function of religion in time of war was the bland endorsement of secular objectives and the securing of divine assistance in their achievement. See also anti-Semitism.

Keith Robbins, Norman Davies, (Poland) and Michael Bourdeaux (USSR)

Bibliography

Alexeev, W. , and Stavrou, T. G. , The Great Revival: the Russian Church under German Occupation (Minneapolis, 1976),
Fletcher, W. C. , A Study in Survival: The Church in Russia, 1927–1943 (London, 1965).
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Dmitri Donskoi , 1350–89, Russian hero, grand duke of Moscow (1359–89). He successfully resisted Lithuanian attempts to invade Moscow, and was the first Russian prince since the Mongol conquest who dared to wage open war on the Tatars . His great victory at Kulikovo (1380) made him a popular Russian hero, but the Tatars regained their overlordship by their successful surprise attack on Moscow in 1382.