The Introduction opens by establishing a central point of the book: that German military chaplains were physically present at sites of mass killing of Jews and other victims of the Holocaust and World War II. The 1941 massacre of Jewish children at Bila Tserkva in occupied Ukraine is described and analyzed using German and Jewish sources. The theme of power and legitimation, which runs throughout the entire book, is presented. Building from the killing at Bila Tserkva and the role of chaplains there, the chapter shows how the Wehrmacht chaplains had considerable power. They served to legitimize Hitler’s regime and its genocidal war and played a key role in creating a reassuring narrative of events for German soldiers, their families, and the chaplains themselves. Other themes introduced include systems and dynamics (the importance of the chaplaincy as an institution), the forces of war and the confusion it generates, and habit: chaplains’ actions and decisions even before the war set patterns that became entrenched. The sources and methodology are explained, with emphasis on integrating Jewish sources.

Chapter 5 studies the life of the Dominican friars on the English Mission from 1661 to 1850, in London where they were at first welcome at court or attached to embassy chapels, at their family seats, or as chaplains attached to recusant families on rural estates. It shows their normally good relations with patrons, but also their insecurity for most of the period in the absence of sufficient residences with a guaranteed income where one friar could succeed another in the local mission. The friars maintained their Dominican idenity through their liturgy, their spiritual reading, their letters, and meetings. As the Industrial Revolution took hold, they were able to gain more support from ordinary lay Catholics in urban parishes, but also required to fund the construction of new churches and schools, while the lack of recuits required them to withdraw from many missions.

This chapter explores the introduction and rolling out of the separate system in England and Ireland, contextualising this in terms of earlier and rival systems of discipline, notably the silent system. It examines critiques of separate confinement, with vocal opponents often highly critical of the impact of the system on prisoner’s minds, and the extensive debates among prison administrators, governors, chaplains, and medical officers, as to whether separate confinement might provoke cases of mental disorder. Modifications were introduced to the purest form of separate confinement, yet, as we explain, the separate system continued to dominate penal policy and practice, despite persistent concerns about the damage it inflicted on prisoners’ minds. Drawing on examples from individual prisons, including Pentonville and Mountjoy, the chapter examines the management of mental illness among prisoners, and the ways in which power shifted from the chaplains, key advocates of separate confinement from the 1830s, to the medical officers in the 1850s, as the prison medical service became more coherent and regulated.

Examines the role of music in religious worship and pastoral care on the fighting fronts. It will show how the singing of hymns was a central feature of several organizations’ work in drawing men towards their religious services and pastoral care, and of how they were deployed in times of great stress. It will show how many of the voluntary-aid organisations combined their own brands of practical Christian philanthropy and pastoral care to servicemen as a ‘counter-attraction’ to keep men away from less salubrious pursuits, as well as to educate and civilize servicemen and labourers fighting for Britain