This chapter analyses the impact exerted on the Catholic Church’s pastoral networks in Germany by the mass evacuation of laypeople from bombed urban areas as of 1941. Drawing on the voluminous correspondence of priests and curates despatched from the Rhineland and Westphalia to Saxony, Thuringia, Silesia, Austria, and elsewhere to minister to Catholic evacuees, this chapter provides in-depth analysis of the social and cultural histories of religious practice in wartime Germany. It demonstrates that the evacuation of laypeople—a topic long neglected within histories of wartime religious practice—exerted a profound influence on pastoral practice by the years 1943–5, placing unprecedented pressures on the Catholic clergy of the dioceses central to this study (Aachen, Cologne and Münster). This chapter therefore also casts new light on regionalism in Germany during the Nazi era.
