The persecution of Jews in the Third Reich came to rest on a battery of definitions which turned the various understandings of private, professional and corporate life upside-down and subordinated them all to the new fictions of the new ideology. In such a way did countless men, women suddenly find themselves incarcerated in administrative categories which had never occurred to them before. But who was a ‘Jew’ and who was a ‘Non-Aryan’? And what kind of ‘Non-Aryan’ might one be?

These two books look in depth at the consequences of these questions as they affected the institutions of the Protestant Churches. The first, edited and substantially written by the admirable Manfred Gailus, presents a careful exploration of the elaborate organisations established by five regional Churches to meet the new demand for genealogical information. The upshot is a striking picture of the various activities which defined this steady, relentless enterprise in the quiet church archives of the Third Reich. The fusion of charitable usefulness, empiricism and ideology proves to be intense. One office proudly announces itself with the slogan ‘The Church serves the family’ and immediately begins its self-justification with the sentence, ‘The power of the nation is based on the purity of the blood.’ Often the directors become studies in themselves: in Schleswig-Holstein the archivist Wilhelm Hahn is a convinced ideologue. In Mecklenburg the careful Edmund Albrecht adopts a policy of ‘taktische Dummheit’. In Hanover the ambivalent but evidently compliant Walther Lampe views the matter as a technical one and becomes a model of pragmatism. Indeed, the disturbing potential of self-absorbed specialisation hangs horribly over the whole business. For his part, the Württemberg pastor Paul Schemp has no illusions about how the Churches have become complicit in a vast programme of persecution. In the final essay, Gailus shows how desperate and destructive the tensions of this world could prove to be by examining the family history of the leader of the Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung himself, Kurt Mayer. Although he observes that the book at large marks only a beginning, and that there is still much to do, it is a truly important study in its own right.

Hartmut Ludwig, meanwhile, offers a survey of the fabled ‘Büro Grüber’, a small, church-sponsored organisation which was set up in May 1938, just outside the Marienkirche in central Berlin. The task of the bureau was quite simply to get as many victims of the persecution out of Germany as it could. Heinrich Grüber himself was the pastor of the parish of Kaulsdorf, but he also had charge of the Dutch congregation in the city. Under his direction the bureau became something of a civilisation in its own right, attracting the services of a number of remarkable individuals who were as hopelessly caught up in the racial rubrics of the National Socialist state as were their supplicants. Because of their combined efforts as many as 1,138 men, women and children had emigrated by the end of August 1939, most of them to Britain. But time was short and the dangers mounted. In December 1940 the organisation was extinguished and Grüber himself was dispatched to Sachsenhausen. By the end of the war fourteen of his colleagues had been deported to extermination camps and killed. Here, Ludwig retrieves them, one at a time, framing their often brief biographies and creating a literary and photographic memorial to them all. He then looks at the ongoing history of the revived Evangelische Hilfsstelle after 1945 and a later director, Walter Sylten, adds a memoir. Such a painstakingly thorough and profoundly humane book surely places us all in the author's debt.