The reputation of the Christian Churches suffered as a result of their supine posture in the face of the challenges posed by National Socialism in Germany. Elements of the Church of the majority (62 per cent, the Evangelical Church) – especially the ‘German Christian Faith Movement’ – actively collaborated with Hitler's regime, although other individuals and groups within that Church protested at some Nazi policies and sometimes mounted obstruction to them. The Catholic Church (representing 32 per cent of Germans) was cast in the role of an ‘opponent’ by the security service of the SS, yet its opposition did not stray much beyond protests against policies that infringed its authority or its doctrinal precepts. While there has been talk of both Churches being ‘persecuted’ in Nazi Germany, their experience did not match that of the state-sponsored violence and discrimination endured by the Orthodox Church in Russia between 1917 and 1941. The main charge levelled at both German Churches is that levelled routinely against Germans in general: they did nothing to prevent the Holocaust.

Conventional wisdom has it that the clergy and most of the laity of the Catholic Church remained impervious to the appeal of Nazism. Kevin Spicer thinks differently. He has investigated closely the attitudes and conduct of a group of 138 Catholic priests who supported Hitler and National Socialism and could therefore be designated ‘brown priests’. Spicer makes much of the early (pre-1933) acceptance by some Catholic priests of National Socialism, its leader and its doctrines. Is there any reason to be surprised that Catholic priests in the 1930s had ‘a personal history of supporting a conservative, right-wing agenda’ (p. 22)? It is surely more surprising where Catholic priests did not support such an agenda. Opposition to the defeat of 1918, the rise of Bolshevism in Europe, the results of removing censorship of the arts in Germany and the workings of democracy generally was the stock-in-trade of the Catholic Church. These same bogeymen led many Protestants, too, to welcome the accession of Hitler to power.

Much of Spicer's book consists of biographical essays about individual ‘brown priests’. For some, disillusionment with the institution of the Church, which seemed to have been infected by ‘Jewish’ attitudes, led to a conviction that the only way to rediscover ‘true Christianity’ was through Nazism and, especially, the leadership of Hitler. Not all of them went as far as Father Anton Heuberger, who advocated putting ‘Volk and Fatherland’ ahead of ‘God, Christ and Church’ in his order of priorities. But the ‘brown priests’ blamed the Church rather than the State for the difficult relations between the two. Spicer makes it clear that such priests did not have the support of members of the hierarchy and that the latter, including prominently Cardinal Faulhaber, demonstrated deep displeasure with ‘brown priests’ by denying some of them office in the Church. Some bishops maintained a policy of disciplining priests who publicly endorsed Nazi policies and – sometimes – criticised the Church for not doing the same.

Spicer tells a fascinating and soundly documented story. One does, however, wonder if it would have been more useful to other scholars to have had an analytical framework based on priestly attitudes to Nazism and the efforts of the hierarchy to restrain the ‘brown priests’, with individual examples as illustration, rather than a narrative account where some of the same features recur in the stories of the individual priests. More generally interesting points are buried in the narrative, for example that ‘most of [the bishops] were under the impression that a new Kulturkampf had already begun’ in 1935 (p. 166). We learn only on pp. 173ff that the ‘brown priests’ formed a group in 1938.

Some of Spicer's ‘brown priests’ even made common cause with the ‘German Christians’ (DC) – the pro-Nazi faction within the Evangelical (Protestant) Church – meeting together in Thuringia, in central Germany, which was solidly (90 per cent) Evangelical, and a stronghold of the DC. Although some Thuringians left the Church during the Third Reich, nevertheless their Land remained overwhelmingly Evangelical, with even those who had left the Church being given a religious funeral. But many were merely nominal Protestants, with only a small minority taking communion in the 1930s. Thuringia was the first German state to have a Nazi minister: Wilhelm Frick was interior and education minister in 1930, and in 1932 Fritz Wächtler – a DC stalwart – became education and then also interior minister. The DC scored a success in the Thuringian church assembly elections of 1932, emerging as the largest group. Their platform was based on deploring the ills of the modern world, and especially the ‘godlessness’ that it had spawned. Protestants beyond the DC welcomed Hitler's accession to power, not least because it spelled the end of political Catholicism with the dissolution of the Centre Party.

Susanne Böhm gives a methodical and highly informative account of the role of the DC in Thuringia before and during the Third Reich. She shows how the Thuringian DC was able to dominate Evangelical church life, including its personnel and often the content of services and the conduct of festivals. Its assiduous compliance with antisemitic legislation led to the marginalising of baptised non-‘Aryans’. But Böhm demonstrates that the DC in Thuringia was not a monolithic entity: as in the DC in other parts of Germany, there were splits, splinter groups and rivalries. Böhm identifies three different strands within it and illustrates these with short biographical passages about some of their most prominent representatives. The völkisch (ethnic nationalist) tendency included men, such as the journalist Artur Bonus, who wanted a ‘Germanic’ church but not necessarily one whose doctrines included Nordic heroes and sagas, as well as men, such as pastor Walter Nothmann, who did want to include these aspects, at the expense of the ‘Jewish’ Old Testament. Another group within the Thuringian DC was part of the ‘National Church Movement’, which aimed for a non-confessional church of all ‘Germanic’ Christians. The leaders of this tendency in Thuringia were two pastors, Siegfried Leffler and Julius Leutheuser, who had left the Bavarian Evangelical Church because of its opposition to their views. The third, and larger, group was that of the ‘Moderate’ DC who continued to adhere to traditional Protestant beliefs and teachings. Within this loose grouping, which generally observed Luther's ‘two kingdoms’ principle, there was a range of attitudes, with even an NSDAP member like pastor Gottfried Meincke rejecting attempts to impose Nordic teaching on church doctrine, while accepting political antisemitism.

Throughout the Third Reich, Evangelical church services continued to be held, with their content in Thuringia determined by the tendency to which a parish's pastor belonged. This led to problems where parishioners' preferences were different. In wartime, the clergy had a variety of welfare functions, with some being prepared to minister to forced foreign workers and others not. It is a pity that there was not space to deal with other aspects of wartime work, for example ministering to the needs of evacuees.