Links to two picture collections on the Nazis and the churches

 
Jim Walker's fascinating collection includes priests giving the Hitler salute, a painting by the Fuehrer of a madonna and (blond) child, and a pious children's book that tells the little ones, (referring to the site ascribed to the crucifixion of Jesus): “When you see a cross, then think of the horrible murder by the Jews on Golgotha...”.

●  photos

●  artifacts

The belt buckle 

My father was born in 1920 into a farming family in the Ukraine. He was the youngest child and lost his mother when he was two. In 1932-33 an unprecedented peacetime catastrophe engulfed them: “the terror-famine in the Ukraine”.  The family managed to survive only because his father skillfully avoided being forced into a collective farm and got job in a small town where he earned a tiny but regular income. My father dreamed of becoming a doctor, but the only way for a poor boy like him to get an education was to enrol in a military academy, which he did in 1938.
 
In 1941 he graduated as an officer of the Red Army, just as the Hitler began his invasion of the Soviet Union. This resulted in my father being  posted to the front for the whole of the conflict from 1941 to 1945. It was a  baptism of fire: in July 1941, at the defence of Kiev (1941), the new graduate received the suicidal order to take from the Germans a hill overlooking the surrounding countryside. He was instructed to tell his men, who were untrained and unarmed villagers recruited only the day before, to pick up the rifles belonging to dead soldiers lying in a field and run uphill  with them towards the German position.

Naturally, the whole company was mowed down by a German machine gun. My father tried to find the location of the machine gun and was hit by a German sniper who apparently noticed the glint of the sun off my father's binoculars. It was a close call: the bullet passed through his left shoulder just an inch from his heart. My father was evacuated to a hospital, which saved his life. He discovered later that he was the only survivor, not just from his company but from the whole regiment.

After recovering from his wounds he was then immediately sent off to fight in the Siege of Moscow from October 1941 to January the next year. This midwinter campaign turned out to be one of  the most deadly in world history.

It was during this battle my father noticed a shiny belt buckle on a fallen German soldier: “God is with us”.

He was wounded again, and again by a German sniper who was picking off officers. The bullet broke a bone in his leg. Crudely bandaged and unable to move, my father was taken on a back of a truck with other wounded men to a field hospital. On its way, the truck was attacked by a German fighter plane; a hail of machine gun fire killed everyone else in the truck, my father again was the sole survivor.  The fighter was flying so low and was shooting at such close range that my father could clearly see the pilot's face — but was lying on his back absolutely helpless and unable to move. My father was convinced that the pilot also could see faces of men in the truck and knew that he was slaughtering wounded people. 

Killing at war is usually depersonalised: artillery men shelling the enemy from a distance of many miles usually do not see who they kill. What made my father bitter was that the snipers and the pilot were aiming specifically at him, the killing was as personal as it could get. And the killers were wearing belt buckles with the motto “Gott mit Uns”.

For the rest of the war, and indeed for the rest of his life, he felt bitter about that belt buckle, ordered by the Fuehrer — and the collusion that it implied.
 
The author wishes to remain anonymous