The Polish Catholic Church under German Occupation by Jonathan Huener is an engaging study that asks important questions about the Nazi attitude towards the Catholic Church in general, and the Polish Catholic Church in particular. Interestingly, as Huener emphasizes, the Nazi policy towards the Catholic Church was neither consistent throughout the war nor uniform in all the Nazi-occupied territories. As the author shows, the treatment of the Catholic Church was more brutal in the Reichsgau Wartheland (or Warthegau), a region formed from parts of the Polish territory annexed by Nazi Germany in 1939, which experienced “the most severe anti-Polish policies in Nazi-occupied Europe” (61).

The main questions of the book concentrate on the changing relationships between racial, ethnic (national), and religious elements of the Nazi ideology as Poland was “for Hitler the crucial first step in the fulfillment of German imperial ambitions (36).” Another question concerns the uniqueness and peculiarities of Warthegau, “where the regime's basic anti-Christian worldview was merged with the anti-Polish prejudice and racist imperatives that the ethno-racial struggle demanded” (50). It was here where the Łódź ghetto and the first extermination center were established (Kulmhof). As Huener shows, the Reichsgau Wartheland was supposed to become the largest experiment in the Nationalist Socialist racial policy, an area that was supposed to be transformed within ten years into living space (lebensraum) with a pure German population.

The book is organized into 18 relatively short chapters that help to understand the development of anti-Catholic policy on the occupied Polish lands, as well as the place of anti-religious and anti-Catholic policy in the Nazi worldview. Each chapter offers a vignette that introduces the readers to some aspects of the larger story of the Reichsgau Wartheland. In the book, the author combines problematic and chronological approaches. He begins in September 1939 by showing the scope and nature of the mass targeting of Polish priests, who were often considered as members of the country's elites (chapter 1) and as such were viewed as a way to weaken the country's spirit. In this regard, some of the statistics are telling. As Huener shows, Polish clerics constituted 68 percent of all the Catholic Clergy imprisoned in Dachau, who amounted for 83 percent of the clergy that died there. (174) The subsequent chapters (ch. 1–4) analyze the ideological bases of National Socialist policy and the place of Catholicism, and Polish Catholicism, in it.

Following chapters investigate the changing policy towards the Polish Catholics as well as continue presenting the plunder and desecration that Catholic churches fell victims to. Some of the chapters focus on specific events; for example, the treatment of the clergy in September of 1939, or Dominselaktion - a raid of the Cathedral Island on Ostrów Tumski in Wrocław in October 1939. Another interesting chapter that at the same time fills an important lacuna is the chapter on a camp in Bojanowo, where nuns were sent following an order from 1940 calling for the dissolution of all confessional institutions, including hospitals, orphanages, cloisters, and religious homes. Some of the most interesting chapters concern the parish life (chapter 15) and the participation of the churchgoers who were denied free and unrestrained access to practicing their religion in the conditions of war conspiracy (Chapter 16). Can the practice of faith be considered a political gesture? What does participation in public workshop offer to people who inhabited occupied territories where they were sometimes denied the most basic rights? As Huener shows, active resistance was not the norm (252). “In fact, accounts of German police officials after the 1941 Aktion consistently describe the Polish churchgoing population as generally apathetic and resigned to the new order (252).”

Huener also engages with the question of how much help the inhabitants of the Reichsgau Wartheland offered to the Jewish population. As we know, Warthegau played a crucial place in the execution of the Final Solution. According to Huener, contacts between the Jewish and Polish populations were limited, and instances of aid were less common (261). He enumerates various factors that account for this situation but also mentions reasons why it is difficult to measure with precision the responses of the Catholics to the annihilation of Jews. One of the reasons, according to Huener, is the fact that the people who helped Jews may not have been eager or willing to document their actions. Unfortunately, here Huener does not provide any examples, or further literature, so the reader does not have a full understanding of what may be hiding behind this fear.

The short chapters that the book consists of make this dense book highly readable. Additionally, they constitute a great material for undergrad classes, when instructors do not necessarily want to assign the entire book. Many of the chapters can be very useful in classes on Polish history, the history of religious persecution under Nazism, or simply the complexity of the Nazi ideology. One has to commend the author for the rich choice of sources, many of which emphasize the author's historical intuition and persistence, for example in chapter 10, the author documents the “Thirteen points” policy that was supposed to guide church policy in Warthegau - the policy was never written, but rather it was orally passed on. The list of thirteen points that the author includes in the book integrates several sources (143). The impressive photos in the book also serve as a great addition, oftentimes stirring new questions and enriching the reading of the book.

The book is a fascinating addition to what we know about the way the Nazi regime operated. It is great work that will be beneficial to historians of Poland, the Second World Word, and Nazism. But it is also a great book for both undergraduate and graduate students.