Chapter 7 considers the Wehrmacht chaplains after World War II. Defeat and occupation created barriers but also possibilities. Christianity provided common ground with the Allies, including US, French, and British chaplains. Former Wehrmacht chaplains, like Werthmann, became spokesmen for German soldiers and mediators with the victors. Defeat opened roles, like ministering to POWs and imprisoned Nazis. In the Cold War context, chaplains presented themselves as having been a Christian bulwark against Nazi paganism and now against Communism. Thus chaplains who had legitimated the Nazi German war effort found ways to legitimate themselves. The chapter contrasts the Wehrmacht chaplains’ postwar roles with US Jewish chaplains, who became strong advocates for Jewish displaced persons. Popular culture continued to present the Wehrmacht chaplains as tragic heroes who had tried to uphold Christian ethics in the face of evil, but at the level of policy, the old model of military chaplaincy was repudiated. East Germany did not permit chaplains, and in West Germany, the new chaplaincy created in the 1950s was tasked not with boosting morale but with being a voice of conscience in the military.

At first glance, the Battle of the Atlantic appears to be the arena of war most likely to provide a trigger for a German declaration of war on the USA. The US Navy had been establishing a presence in the eastern half of the North Atlantic with increasing assertiveness since April 1941 and even began escorting British convoys in mid-September 1941. Historians attempting to integrate these events into Hitler’s decision to declare war on the US fall into two different camps. One see in it an unavoidable reaction to the presence of US escorts who were stymying the efforts of his U-boats to get at the convoys, while other maintain the he was longing to unleash his submersibles at the vulnerable merchant traffic in US waters.

I am now in a position to prove that neither was the case. US escorts only rarely had to prove their worth, because of the low number of convoy interceptions between July-December 1941 – a direct consequence of the rerouting of convoys thanks to the work done in Bletchley Park. Also, not a shred of evidence exists to suggest that either Raeder or Dönitz regarded patrols to the Americas as a missed opportunity.