The chapter examines the crisis of the First World War, battlefield action, the war’s impact on patterns of domestic conflict, and the reasons for Germany’s defeat.

The Axis defeat in 1945 ushered in a lengthy American-dominated Allied military occupation in Germany and Japan, which started in a highly punitive mode. The occupation authorities focused on rooting out the purveyors of Nazism and ultranationalist Japanese ideology. The occupiers also sought to eliminate the military and to dismantle or severely restrict industrial capacity. The unintended consequences of these punitive measures were, however, momentous in the medium and long term. In their quest to eliminate the massive concentrations of economic power of monopolistic corporations, American trustbusters redefined the competitive landscape, mostly for the better. And the Allied ban on the aviation industry in both countries caused aeronautical engineers and managers to seek employment in other quarters, above all in the automobile industry. They and the companies they worked for swiftly applied to car manufacturing what they had learned about quality control and efficiency from supplying airplanes to the Luftwaffe and the Japanese military. The result was high-quality mass production, which soon extended to other industries. In Japan, moreover, teams of former aviation engineers and managers were hired by the Railway Ministry, where they applied their stubbornness and can-do attitude in developing the bullet train.

Chapter 7 considers the Wehrmacht chaplains after World War II. Defeat and occupation created barriers but also possibilities. Christianity provided common ground with the Allies, including US, French, and British chaplains. Former Wehrmacht chaplains, like Werthmann, became spokesmen for German soldiers and mediators with the victors. Defeat opened roles, like ministering to POWs and imprisoned Nazis. In the Cold War context, chaplains presented themselves as having been a Christian bulwark against Nazi paganism and now against Communism. Thus chaplains who had legitimated the Nazi German war effort found ways to legitimate themselves. The chapter contrasts the Wehrmacht chaplains’ postwar roles with US Jewish chaplains, who became strong advocates for Jewish displaced persons. Popular culture continued to present the Wehrmacht chaplains as tragic heroes who had tried to uphold Christian ethics in the face of evil, but at the level of policy, the old model of military chaplaincy was repudiated. East Germany did not permit chaplains, and in West Germany, the new chaplaincy created in the 1950s was tasked not with boosting morale but with being a voice of conscience in the military.

This chapter examines the commentary tradition of a one-line fragment of Ennius’ Annals, qui vicit non est victor nisi victum fatetur (513 Skutsch). Although modern commentators have adduced a broad range of comparanda, their selection of historical parallels reflects preconceived notions of what the line must mean. By returning to the line’s original context in a late-antique scholium on the Aeneid, we are better able to appreciate the line as an epic fragment. Parallels drawn from Ennius and other poets allow for a different reading of the fragment, and suggest alternative methodologies for the use of fragments in historical arguments.