God's Man in Hitler's Army: The Untold Story of Wilhelm Rott

He was conscripted into the Third Reich, and so his Christian bravery has gone overlooked.

In the frozen, blood-caked trenches of the Eastern Front—where rats gnawed at corpses and men cracked like porcelain under the strain of ice and artillery—there walked a German chaplain with a Bible in one hand and the fire of heaven in his chest. His name was Wilhelm Rott, and while the rest of Europe tried to figure out how to survive Hell, he marched straight into it preaching repentance, forgiveness, and the iron-willed Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Yes—he was German. And yes, he wore the uniform of the Wehrmacht during World War II. That’s the part of the story most people will choke on, because we’ve been conditioned to see history in stark black and white, good and evil, victor and villain. But Rott was a man who loved Jesus with all his soul, and he did not take part in any atrocity. He was not a Nazi. He was a conscripted pastor, forced to serve in an army he did not align with, caught in a maelstrom not of his choosing. But he chose what mattered. He chose Christ. And everything he did—he did for the name above every name.

He was not a Party man. Not a propagandist for the Reich. He didn’t preach Hitler. He didn’t salute swastikas. He preached Christ crucified to men who were dying in droves, abandoned by their leaders and forgotten by history. And he preached it while being shelled, starved, frozen, and hunted.

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