There is an interesting and instructive parallel to be drawn between Germany's scientists during the Nazi era and Germany's churchmen. Yet critiques of the conduct of Germany's scientists during Hitler's era have been far more penetrating, if not actually more prolific, than studies of churchmen. Historians of science such as Alan Beyerchen, Klaus Hentschel, Mark Walker, and Robert Proctor have focused on the theme of the fellow traveler rather than the rank Nazi enthusiast. The argument of Professor Walker, particularly, is that fellow traveling did more to encourage support for National Socialism, and with more disastrous consequences, than did the fanatics—who were largely despised and ineffectual.

Fellow traveling in this context involved accepting benefits from the dictator while maintaining a perceived moral distance from his policies and actions. An example of fellow traveling among the scientific majority was the failure to demonstrate or object when colleagues were dismissed from their posts in 1933 as a result of being Jewish. Many senior scientists—such as Carl Friedrich Weizsacker, Werner Heisenberg, and Max Planck, who constantly denied that they were Nazis, acquiesced in the dismissals while distancing themselves from Nazism itself. Meanwhile, enthusiastic Nazi scientists such as Philip Lenard and Joannes Stark, while having a small following within their research communities, were largely ignored by the majority. Why was fellow traveling so dangerous? Because it demoralized those who were tempted to resist, gave comfort to the Nazis, and dignified them in the eyes of the world. Most scandalously, moreover, fellow traveling persuaded the undecided that there was nothing to fear and mollified the young.

The issue of fellow traveling, and its consequences, within the German churches has not been explored to anything like the same extent. Its neglect in Professor Kevin Spicer's otherwise admirable study of Nazi Catholic priests unfortunately enfeebles his overview, which appears to make no distinction between non-Nazis, fellow travelers, and keen Nazis within the priesthood. He sets out to identify those priests, widely known as “brown priests,” who were manifest supporters of Hitler. As it turns out, there were very few, and they were not particularly distinguished or powerful. He has found 138, of whom 109 were diocesan or secular priests within Germany, 19 were members of religious orders, and 10 came from outside Germany. He has done a thorough job tracing these individuals in the German Federal Archives in Berlin-Lichterfelde and the U.S. National Archives. They are mostly sad, faintly ridiculous individuals whose motives ranged from patriotism and a Germanic sense of injured merit post-Versailles to disgruntlement with Church authority. There were clearly those, moreover, who saw opportunities for advancement and power within the Nazi party. The consequences of their priestly Nazism are more difficult to gauge. Spicer cites, for example, the instance of a certain Father Anton Heuberger of Hizhofen, a “latent anti-Semite” who rejected the Versailles Treaty and looked forward to a patriotic destiny of greatness for Germany. Heuberger wrote a letter to an inquirer proclaiming that a German priest could embrace the tenets of Nazism and remain a good priest. The letter was printed and distributed by the Nazis, spreading like wildfire to all parts of Germany. But there is no indication as to its impact and lasting effect.

Fellow traveling by those who would never appear in a roll call of “brown priests,” however, had profound and far-reaching consequences. The most historic example in ecclesiastic affairs was surely the negotiation conducted between Hitler and Vatican secretary of state Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pius XII). Pacelli of course was Italian, but it should be remembered that he spent from 1917 to 1930 in Germany involved in Vatican diplomacy on behalf of the German hierarchy. Back in the Vatican, as secretary of state, he spent more time on Germany than on all other countries put together.

Early in 1933 Hitler and Pacelli agreed to a Reich Concordat, an international treaty between the Holy See and the German state. Hitler had urgent reasons: he wanted to avoid another Kulturkampf; Pacelli, who had pursued such a concordat since 1917 unsuccessfully, wanted the 1917 Code of Canon Law, the modernizing instrument of Church centralization, imposed on Germany—a rich, educated, and recalcitrant local Church. The jewel in the Code's crown was a new decree stating that the pope and only the pope was entitled to nominate new bishops. Hitler, however, sought through the Concordat to abolish Germany's Catholic political and social associations—more or less any form of Catholic communal activity from newspapers to sewing circles. In exchange for Catholic withdrawal from social and political action, he offered certain benefits and privileges, especially educational, to the Catholic Church.

Hitler offered the Catholic Church in Germany more teachers, more school buildings, more Catholic pupil places. At the same time, as was known to Catholic bishops, and indeed to Pacelli and the then-pope, Pius XI, Hitler was withdrawing wide-ranging educational benefits from Jews. Hitler's generosity toward Catholic education in Germany coincided with the mass dismissals of Jewish teachers and university professors and a drastic reduction in Jewish pupil places. Pacelli and the hierarchy's willingness to accept educational benefits from the selfsame source of power that withdrew them from Jews signaled an eloquent collusion with, if not intentional endorsement of, Jewish persecution. Hence they behaved like fellow travelers to the Nazi cause: aloof from Hitler's ideology while accepting his beneficence.

The greatest absence in Professor Spicer's study, however, is that of Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, head of the Catholic Center Party at the time of the concordat negotiations. Kaas persuaded his colleagues in the party (the last remaining democratic party in Germany in the summer of 1933) to vote for Hitler's bid to assume total dictatorial powers in a one-party state. Kaas was Pacelli's close confidante and an acquiescent subordinate throughout these events. The center Party's vote for the “enabling act” was decisive in establishing Hitler's all-embracing tyranny. This done, Monsignor Kaas, on Pacelli's urgent prompting, disbanded the party. That the party dissolved itself voluntarily rather than compulsorily conveyed an impression of Catholic endorsement of Hitler in the eyes of Germany and the world.

Professor Owen Chadwick, the recognized authority on church history in the period, has written that Kaas's vote for Hitler's dictatorship is “one of the most controversial acts of Germany history.” Kaas would have been horrified had anyone accused him of being a brown priest, and yet he did more to support Hitler's regime than all the brown priests put together.