This chapter provides an outline of the book’s central argument, explaining the different dimensions of Vichy’s double bind and situating it within the context of the scholarship on the Vichy French government, Italian Fascist foreign policy, French collaboration and the occupation of France during the Second World War.

The organizational backbone of the post-First World War international order was the League of Nations and the bureaucratic backbone of the League of Nations was its permanent Secretariat. The Secretariat was a radically novel invention in international politics. For the first time a permanent, autonomous international body had been created that managed international affairs and was populated with a multinational staff loyal only to that body. This chapter explores how the Secretariat managed to establish and develop this role for itself. It does so through two analytical steps. First, it explores the early, principled decisions regarding the Secretariat’s organization taken by its first Secretary-General, British diplomat Sir Eric Drummond, to ensure the Secretariat became a genuinely international body with substantial institutional autonomy. Second, it maps what we may, with a conceptual loan from Caterina Carta, term the metadiplomatic activities of the Secretariat, i.e. the activities carried out by the Secretariat leadership in order to develop close and productive relations to its main stakeholders: member states, other League institutions and international public opinion with the overall aim of establishing and expanding its legitimacy

This chapter begins from the proposition that there was neither peace settlement, nor order, nor peace in the British and French empires after 1919. It focuses on those regions where British and French imperial territories and new imperial claims rubbed against one another with greatest friction. With typical acuity, historian John Mackenzie has warned against what he terms ‘the space station approach’ to the analysis of interwar imperialism. Viewed from a great distance, the First World War ‘becomes a sort of hinge or lever that articulates the events of the decades that went before and also those that came afterwards’. Mackenzie’s insight offers a starting point for this chapter’s analysis, which warns against regarding decolonisation deterministically, written as much in the failure of peacemaking as in the intensification of international rivalries in the 1930s. It thus draws the British and French empires back from their historical precipice, restoring a sense of contingency and according due importance to the short-term imperial expansions of the 1920s and the persistence of everyday violence and colonial rights abuses despite the new architecture of supranational oversight emerging from the peace settlement.

The year 1919 is now remembered primarily as the year in which peace was restored to Europe following the cataclysm of the Great War. But it was also, no less importantly, a time of upheaval across much of the colonial world. In North Africa, Egyptians rose in revolt against British control and Tunisian protesters demanded the restoration of the constitution from their French overlords. Indians, too, rose against British rule, launching a concerted campaign that year for Indian self-determination. And across East and Southeast Asia – in China, Korea, Indochina, the Dutch East Indies – uprisings against imperialism transformed polities and societies. In short, the wake of the Great War saw the rise of a transnational revolt against the imperial world order, a revolt that would profoundly shape the transformation of international order in the ensuing decades.

Chapter 4 focuses on the months from June to December 1941. As the Germans and their Axis partners invaded Soviet territory, they carried out massacres of Jews, murdering hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children in open-air shootings. Chaplains accompanied the Wehrmacht in this period, too, as the regular military cooperated with SS killing squads. Along with violence against Jews and Soviet POWs, the German invasion brought widely publicized efforts to rescue Christianity from Communism. Central to that project was the reopening of churches that had been closed under Soviet rule. This chapter uses a set of photographs of the reopening of a church in Zhytomyr to analyze the linkage between saving Christianity and killing Jews and to understand how military chaplains fit into that equation. Chaplains were key figures in a narrative that recast German violence as a story of Christian redemption. Their reports and sermons rarely mention atrocities but they communicated awareness indirectly in ways that fixated on the Germans’ own suffering. This chapter uses Jewish sources to contextualize and understand German accounts without reproducing their erasure of the victims.

Chapter 1 provides a snapshot of the situation of military chaplains in Germany on the eve of Hitler’s coming to power. The central point is that German chaplains’ support of Hitler and the Nazi movement was predictable but not inevitable. The chapter opens with a parade of Stormtroopers into the Garrison Church in Potsdam. Pastors of the military congregation there actively promoted antidemocratic causes and, by 1932, they and most of their Protestant and Catholic counterparts explicitly backed Hitler. Factors that explain this outcome include the lost war, which put chaplains in a precarious position. Many lost their jobs and became preachers for hire. Defeat in 1918 put chaplains and church leaders on the defensive, because they were part of the home front that was said to have betrayed the military. The role of history, tradition, and myth in shaping the chaplaincy is discussed, as well as the entrenched place of antisemitism in the German military. Also noted are the legacies of colonialism and white supremacy that provided narratives of Christian righteousness. By 1933, significant personal ties had been established between top chaplains and military and Nazi leaders.

Chapter 2 explores the situation of chaplains from 1933 to 1939. Studies of Nazi Germany often neglect these years, but developments and decisions made at this time proved crucial. The chapter opens with a look at a chaplain who accompanied the Condor Legion to Spain during the Civil War. Pastor Keding’s account encapsulates the central insight of this chapter: during the first six years of Hitler’s rule, a loyal military chaplaincy emerged. The men appointed to serve the new Wehrmacht as military bishops, the Catholic Rarkowski and Protestant Dohrman, were old-fashioned patriots who brought credibility to the chaplaincy. Procedures for selecting chaplains were developed to prioritize keeping out men deemed potential troublemakers. The lingering perception that Christianity had contributed to Germany’s failure to win in 1918 put chaplains on the defensive and led them to try to prove and re-prove their effectiveness. Chaplains seized the opportunity presented by German rearmanent in 1935 to expand their numbers. They endorsed exclusion of Jews and celebrated German triumphs from remilitarization of the Rhineland to annexation of Austria. By September 1939 they were ready for war.