This collection of biographical studies provides a richly textured and nuanced picture of the Protestant-Lutheran regional Church in Saxony during the Third Reich. As one would expect, clergy aligned with either the German Christian movement or the Confessing Church play a prominent role, but four of the eighteen chapters highlight pastors and superintendents in the ‘Middle’ who hoped to reduce conflict within the Church. Five additional chapters focus on individuals who were persecuted due to race or political orientation. In all cases the biographical approach serves not only to ‘highlight the day-to-day existence of pastors in the [National Socialist] dictatorship’ (p. 13) but also reveals continuities, shifts and ruptures in lives that began during the Kaiserreich and in most cases continued beyond 1945.

Most of the clergy examined in this collection were initially enthusiastic about the Nazi revolution, but only a minority gave unqualified support throughout the entire period of the Third Reich. Among them was Johannes Axt, who served on the staff at the Landesanstalt Grossschweidnitz, an institution for people with mental illnesses and developmental disabilities. Though Axt never joined the Nazi Party, he supported the forced sterilisation of patients at the institution, and during the T-4 programme his ‘pastoral care’ involved misleading the families of murdered individuals about the real causes of death, which he frequently described as a ‘solution’ rather than a tragedy. Yet there were others whose support for Nazism waned as they became aware of its incompatibility with their values. Erich Knabe, who served as rector at the Brüderanstalt Moritzburg, confronted the regime when its ‘euthanasia’ programme threatened the lives of the 200 children and youths with disabilities who were at the centre of his ministry. A combination of pneumonia and interrogation by the Gestapo led to his early death in 1940. How Axt and Knabe could arrive at such different conclusions about ‘racial hygiene’ and its compatibility or incompatibility with Christianity remains unexplained.

Other chapters focus on individuals who were consistently anti-Nazi throughout the Third Reich. Friedrich Delekat, Paul Tillich's successor at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden, saw no possibility of accommodation with a state that was comparable to ancient Rome in its persecution of the Church. Rudolf Stempel also opposed Nazism, though he seems to have found the Confessing Church too narrow for his liberal theological orientation. In response to a series of articles in which he made references to ‘a wise Jew that should be our leader [Führer]’ and the dangers of a ‘false leadership [falsche Führung]’ (p. 252), Stempel was arrested, briefly interned and tortured, a traumatic experience that almost certainly played a role in his death two years later. Erhard Starke and Johannes Grosse were religious socialists who had left church work for civil service positions, only to be summary fired in 1933. Though both survived the Third Reich, Grosse found himself in an awkward relationship with both Church and State in the German Democratic Republic.

The collection also sheds light on those pastors and superintendents who believed that they could stand above political and church-political conflicts and focus exclusively on religious matters. Moderates like Johannes Herz and Ernst Loesche (both of the Middle) were well-meaning but ‘took the path of least resistance’ in a historical moment that called for a more confrontational approach (p. 190). Some of their less scrupulous colleagues selectively remembered or wilfully misrepresented their pasts in postwar deNazification proceedings, but others were simply incapable of understanding why support for Nazism would disqualify them from upper leadership positions in the postwar Church. Such was the case with Adolf Münnich, who died in 1977 without ever having acknowledged ‘that in joining the Nazi party in 1933 he had committed a significant spiritual error … In that sense’, according to his biographer Christian Löhr, ‘he resembled his church’ (p. 59).

One of the most important advantages of a close study of individual biographies is that it sheds additional light on the complexity, malleability and fluidity of political and church-political alignments during this period. The most astonishing example is that of Heinrich Gottlieb, who was driven from the pastorate due to his Jewish ancestry. His pre-1933 engagement with the völkisch movement and enthusiastic support for the Nazi party after 1933 led none other than Martin Sasse, a stridently anti-semitic Protestant bishop in the neighboring state of Thuringia, to come to his defence. Like his colleague Oskar Bruhns, who spent the first four decades of his life in the Baltic region, Gottlieb's work as a diaspora pastor in Bohemia led him to see Germans as a people under threat and in need of strong leadership and decisive action. Despite the persecution that he himself had experienced, he does not seem to have fundamentally revised his views of Nazism until the final years of the Third Reich (primarily in response to the regime's hostility toward Christianity).

Though rich in historical detail, the collection is uneven when it comes to analysis and engagement with other recent scholarship. Several of the chapters end abruptly with the death of the subject but no holistic assessment of the information that has been presented. In other cases, conclusions do not seem to match the gravity of what actually occurred. When a parish-level conflict between a Confessing Church pastor (Horst Ficker) and a German Christian pastor (Friedrich Bohland) is revealed to be the result of personal animosity rather than higher principles, is it enough to note that ‘in the end, it was the parish that suffered’ (p. 116)? Would collegiality have mattered if the wider context remained unchallenged? Likewise, is it sufficient to surmise that Gottlieb felt vindicated when his Church finally apologised for abandoning its members who were of Jewish ancestry? Bolder claims are certainly possible. Nevertheless, readers who are disappointed by the reticence of some of the contributors will find plenty of fascinating material from which to draw their own conclusions.