The release in 2005 of documents in the Vatican archives relating to the papacy of Pius xi (1922–39) have enabled scholars to scrutinise more closely diplomatic relations between the Vatican and nation states in the run-up to the Second World War. Hubert Wolf has focused in his research on aspects of the Holy See's negotiations with Germany. Between the 1960s and the 1980s this theme had been explored within the wider context of Nazism and the German Christian confessions by three major scholars, Klaus Scholder, Ludwig Volk sj and J. S Conway. Wolf by no means sets out to compete with these scholars, nor to offer a major corrective. He has written five free-standing essays which offer, in his view, deeper insights and minor nuances benefiting from the perspective of the Holy See's recently released documents. The first essay claims that Eugenio Pacelli, as papal nuncio in Germany from 1917 to 1930, was out of his depth and made no attempt to understand the country, its history and culture. This adds little to the extensive criticisms of Pacelli by Klaus Scholder in his The Churches and the Third Reich; nor does Wolf set out the crucial importance of Pacelli's mission to bring the various provincial concordats into line with the Codex Juris Canonici 1917, which Pacelli had masterminded. The second chapter deals with the Holy See's attitudes toward Judaism. There has been extensive commentary on this theme, not least, and most recently, David I. Kertzer's Unholy war: the Vatican's role in the rise of modern anti-semitism. What Wolf adds to the picture is the benefit of documentation on arguments over liturgical changes, in particular mention of ‘perfidious Jews’. Wolf confirms, however, that papal antipathy towards Judaism was theological (the Jews as Christ-killers) rather than racial, or biological. The most important chapter is the third, on the 1933 Reichskonkordat negotiated on Pius xi's behalf by Pacelli (as secretary-of-state in the Vatican) and Hitler. Wolf focuses specifically on evidence that the Catholic Centre Party dissolved itself before the concordat was signed, in order to insist that the dissolution of the party was not a consequence of the concordat but of a freely made decision by a floundering party. What he fails to explain, however, is the remarkable historical impact of the Centre Party's vote, under the leadership of Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, for the Enabling Act, which gave Hitler dictatorial powers. Owen Chadwick has written that Kaas's ‘role in making the party vote for Hitler's Enabling bill of March 1933 is still one of the most controversial acts of Germany's history’ (Britain and the Vatican during the Second World War, Cambridge 1986, 86). Of the remaining two chapters, the story of Edith Stein (1891–1943), a Jewish philosopher who became a Catholic and a Carmelite is the more important and indeed moving. She wrote to the Vatican during the 1933 period of Jewish academic dismissals, with an accompanying letter from Germany's most senior Benedictine Abbot Raphael Walzer, pleading with the pope to speak out, personally, against the persecution of Jews. Pius xi remained silent for four years, until the publication of his Mit Brennender Sorge. Stein was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942.