Chapter 5 deals with the years 1942 and 1943, as the Germans reached the peak of their military success and then began to decline. Chaplains were part of the brutal regimes of occupation that characterized Nazi German domination of territories and people. The chapter uses the concept of "genocidal culture" to analyze how Christianity, embodied in the chaplains and symbolized by the cross, helped the Germans construct a story of justification that erased their victims and presented themselves as suffering heroes. Examples from France, Greece, North Africa, and the Soviet Union are presented, and personal accounts from Jewish survivors reverse the gaze, to provide a look at the Germans and their religious practices from outside the group. Amidst the extreme yet everyday brutality of German occupation, the Wehrmacht chaplains turned inward to focus on providing comfort to the men they served and interpreting the war and their role as the ultimate sacrifice. They faced disinterest and at times hostility from soldiers and officers but insisted they were effective “handmaids of the troop leadership.” Chaplains who died or were killed became important figures in a redemptive story of the war.

The Epilogue explores the Nero-Antichrist paradigm in TV and film. Directors and the actors they cast made their own, often personal, decisions about how to portray Nero. It would have been impossible for any one actor to relate every aspect of Nero’s character from literature: cruel, theatrical, violent, militarily inept, destructive, decadent, paranoid, volatile, sexually promiscuous with women and men, and supernatural in his role as the Antichrist. Like those creating Neronian paradigms, they picked, chose, and emphasised the bits they found useful. However, one thing that players of Nero such as Alberto Sordi, Christopher Biggins, and Michael Sheen all had in common was their debt to Peter Ustinov’s portrayal of the emperor in the 1951 Hollywood epic Quo Vadis. This film was based on Sienkiewicz’s 1895 novel, and this novel in turn drew heavily from Farrar’s Darkness and Dawn. As such, Nero’s position in Christian history continued to underpin the idea of the emperor in TV and film into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.