Professor Doris Bergen has been awarded The Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research!
The full article is published on Yad Vashem.
The Yad Vashem Book Prize is awarded annually in recognition of high scholarly published research. Since 2018, the Book Prize has been awarded in Memory of Benny and Tilly Joffe z”l by their son, Brian, and his wife, Lee.
The aims of the book prize is to encourage enlightening research on new topics relating to the Holocaust or topics needing re-evaluation in light of newly discovered documentation. Research accuracy, scholarship, methodology, originality, importance of the research topic, and literary merit are important factors in the work’s consideration.
Professor Doris L. Bergen has won The Yad Vashem Book Prize in 2024 for her book: Between God and Hitler: Military Chaplains in Nazi Germany. She is the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies in the Department of History and Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. She received her PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Doris Bergen's Between God and Hitler: Military Chaplains in Nazi Germany
During the Second World War, approximately 1000 Christian chaplains accompanied Wehrmacht forces wherever they went, from Poland to France, Greece, North Africa, and the Soviet Union. Chaplains were witnesses to atrocity and by their presence helped normalize extreme violence and legitimate its perpetrators. Military chaplains played a key role in propagating a narrative of righteousness that erased Germany’s victims and transformed the aggressors into noble figures who suffered but triumphed over their foes. Between God and Hitler is the first book to examine Protestant and Catholic military chaplains in Germany from Hitler’s rise to power, to defeat, collapse, and Allied occupation. Drawing on a wide array of sources – chaplains’ letters and memoirs, military reports, Jewish testimonies, photographs, and popular culture – this book offers insight into how Christian clergy served the cause of genocide, sometimes eagerly, sometimes reluctantly, even unknowingly, but always loyally.