Both scholarly and popular interest in the activities of the Christian Churches during the Second World War has surged in recent years. Most of these new investigations have had a rather narrow – albeit understandable – focus: the response of the Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church in Germany to the Holocaust. But these two volumes, published in Leuven in 2007 and representing the culmination of a branch of research funded by the European Science Foundation into the impact of National Socialist and Fascist occupation on Europe, broaden that focus considerably. The first volume, devoted to the Roman Catholic Church, moves beyond Rome and Nazi Germany to consider a range of smaller countries: Poland, Croatia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Belgium and the Netherlands. The second volume, covering Protestant, Orthodox and Muslim communities, includes examinations of additional cases from east-central Europe and the smaller countries of western and northern Europe: Ukraine, Serbia, Greece, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Scandinavia and (again) the Low Countries. Most contributions are in English, with four in German; intriguingly, considering the place of publication, none are in French.

Even those who might consider themselves specialists in this field will no doubt be unfamiliar with at least some of these national contexts and will thus learn something from these essays. Appropriately, authors tend to make few assumptions about readers' existing knowledge and take time to put characters, events and political and ecclesiastical structures in context. In most chapters, maps are helpfully provided. But the relative success of the volumes as introductory surveys comes at a price. Most contributions are rather thin, with short texts and/or short bibliographies, and reading through them often feels more like working through a series of encyclopedia entries rather than digging into an integrated historiographic discussion. Only the chapters written by the editors – Lieve Gever's piece on Catholicism in Belgium and the Netherlands and Jan Bank's on Calvinism in the Netherlands and France – along with Patrick Pasture's contribution on Catholic social movements, really compare developments in different countries, though several other chapters do provide some interesting regime comparisons while covering regions that came under serial Nazi and Soviet rule. As is so often the case with edited volumes, authors miss opportunities to relate their own cases to each other's studies or to compare notes on big-picture points of reference. But this is, perhaps, an accurate snapshot of the state of Europe-wide research on this topic: the full range of experiences is just being explored and has yet to be digested.

In addition to geographic range and a focus on smaller countries, the other distinctive characteristic of the volumes is the sympathetic stance that most authors exhibit toward the Churches and prelates under scrutiny. Indeed, the title Religion under siege provides a pretty clear hint that these books are not written in the same spirit as John Cornwell's Hitler's pope or Daniel Goldhagen's Moral reckoning. Jure Kristo's article on Croatia, for example, offers a vigorous defence of the controversial Cardinal Stepinac. Johan Ickx provides an even more strikingly revisionist portrait of Alois Hudal, an Austrian bishop stationed in Rome who has been widely cited as among the ‘brownest’ of Catholic prelates, as instead a principled critic of many aspects of National Socialism. This is not to say that the volumes are devoid of criticism of the Churches and church personnel. The editors' contributions again stand out as nuanced attempts both to survey and to explain the diversity of religious responses to right-wing authoritarian rule and, in particular, wartime targeting of Jews. But most of these essays clearly can be placed on the apologetic side of current debates about the role of the Churches in the Second World War. The resulting, often somewhat defensive tone, combined with the sense of having to introduce ‘obscure’ corners of Europe to a general audience, often works against the ostensible comparative and synthesising agenda of the project: authors seem to be concentrating on fighting their corners rather than engaging with big, overarching questions. None the less, this is a valuable addition to current debates, and the editors are to be commended for pulling together and bringing to a broader audience such wide-ranging contributions.