Chaplains also provided services for the local population if their priest was not present. This happened quite a lot in White Russia and the Ukraine where religious practices had been suppressed under the Soviet regime. Many of the Orthodox churches had been used as storehouses and barns under the Soviets but with the advance of the Axis forces, many villages began to practice their religion again. This led to the initial welcoming of the Germans and their Allies as liberators. This feeling did not last long after the Einsatzgruppen and Sonderkommando of the SS arrived after the front line troops had moved on. It then became a case of swapping one sadistic godless master for another.
Sadly, a large portion of the chaplain’s time would be taken up with the preparation for and conducting of funeral services for the fallen. Photographs of these services show elaborate funerals with all the trappings that armies attach to the funerals of their fallen. However, in frontline areas, all that a chaplain could do was to give a dying man the last rites and retrieve a portion of his dog tags in order to record the soldier’s death. Once the fighting was over, the dead would be recovered and a proper funeral would take place, but as the tide of war turned against Germany, very often all the soldier could hope for was that his death would be recorded and the information passed on to his loved ones. A good example of this practice of recording the details of the fallen is a story told in Berlin during the fierce fighting in 1945 and can be found in James Lucas’s book ‘Last Days of the Reich;’ ‘We had a military chaplain with us in the (flak) tower who was worried because he could not record the details of the fallen. If he could not report these correctly and report them to the proper authority the dead would be merely listed as missing.’ Many people will know the pain of being told that a loved one is missing in action and the chaplains provided a vital service in recording the names of the dead so that their families would know the fate of their beloved son or husband. Garrison chaplains also had the grim task of breaking the news to families of the death of a loved one.
German chaplains were usually attached to medical units of field hospitals and were also on the staff of the larger hospitals. The chaplain’s role here was to provide pastoral care to the wounded. Visitors were very scarce in a field hospital for obvious reasons and so the chaplain was the only visitor many of the soldiers had. Regardless of how religious or non-religious they were, many of the soldiers were glad to get a break form the medical staff and have someone to talk to and perhaps write a letter home for them so that they could let the family know they were recovering. The chaplain also helped the medical staff as best he could; ‘Instead of saying Mass, I held heads and gave shots.’3 The chaplains built up a good rapport with the doctors at a field hospital. Life was hard for the frontline chaplain as he was dealing primarily with the wounded and dying. Many chaplains found it hard to keep going but did so nonetheless.