Beginning in late 1940, Catholic priests arrested by Nazi authorities across Germany and occupied Europe began to be gathered into the Dachau concentration camp. This group of several thousand prisoners was thus quite diverse, including individuals from the far corners of the continent. And yet about half of all of those interned in Dachau and a clear majority of those who died in the camp actually came from a single region: the Reichsgau Wartheland, composed of territory in interwar West-Central Poland subsequently annexed to the greater German Reich. In this province, the Nazi regime persecuted the Roman Catholic church with an intensity and ferocity unparalleled in the rest of Germany or even in the rest of conquered Poland.

The trajectory of that persecution is the subject of Jonathan Huener's monograph, which develops and expands on themes previewed in an article in Central European History in 2014. Drawing on church and state archives within the region and in Berlin and Warsaw, along with a wide array of published primary material and periodicals, Huener provides a richly detailed account of the Nazis’ campaign to hobble and perhaps destroy an institution seen as an irredeemably anti-German menace. The book's eighteen concise chapters take a largely chronological approach, following the escalation of measures against the church between 1939 and 1941, then the somewhat more ambiguous developments between 1942 and 1945. Several chapters provide harrowing accounts of the treatment of the local parish clergy, most of whom faced deportation and/or imprisonment, and almost half of whom perished. Other chapters describe the harsh, albeit less systematic, persecution of Polish nuns in the region; draconian restrictions on Polish-language worship services and other religious practices; and the Nazi regime's preoccupation with enforcing ethnic segregation within the church. In addition to the running central focus on the actions and aims of the Nazi authorities, Huener also provides briefer but informative and insightful analyses of responses by the regional Catholic clergy and the local Catholic population, and of the controversial response (or lack thereof) of the Vatican to the persecution of the church in occupied Poland.

A question that runs through the book is what we should make of the promotion of the Wartheland as a “model Gau,” especially by its Gauleiter, Arthur Greiser. Huener argues that while Nazi policy in the Wartheland should not be seen as a “blueprint” laying out measures that would inevitably be applied elsewhere, it did represent a “testing ground” that might pave the way for a “Reich-wide Kirchenpolitik in the future” (69). This could have involved not only harsh repression of Catholicism across all of the Polish lands or even of the Roman Catholic church as a whole but also, potentially, of all Christian denominations, as part of a “grand strategy of radical secularization and eventual de-Christianization” (146). Huener's argument is a constructively nuanced contribution to ongoing debates about the Nazi regime's relationship with the Christian churches and the overall dynamics of Nazi policy making. While often emphasizing the role of ideological zeal in shaping patterns of persecution, he conscientiously notes both the diversity of views among the top Nazis and the volatility of policies over time in response to unfolding events. The author is also careful to point out the anomalies and apparent contradictions amidst the general brutality of the regime's treatment of the Catholic church in the region. For example, even as the incarceration and deportation of priests and the exclusion of Poles from churches led to the near-paralysis of normal religious practice, Nazi officials were noticeably reticent about the open expropriation of churches or the conversion of church buildings to other uses. This caution was due, in part, to concern about the alienation of pious Volksdeutsche being resettled into the Warthegau from elsewhere in East Europe.

One unfortunate omission in Huener's excellent book is the failure to engage with recent research on neighboring regions, such as Gerhard Wolf's study of Germanization policy across the Polish territories annexed to Germany and Jerzy Myszor's study of church-state relations in wartime Upper Silesia. Reference to this scholarship could have usefully placed analysis of Nazi policy in the Wartheland within a broader comparative context. While officials and residents in these other regions were certainly aware of the exclusionary approach to ethnic segregation being pursued in the “model Gau” and anticipated the possible broader implementation of that approach, there was little actual convergence toward the precedents set in the Wartheland. Instead, Germanization in Danzig-West Prussia and Upper Silesia took a rather different course, focusing on the attempted assimilation of most Polish-speakers into the German Volksgemeinschaft.

This caveat notwithstanding, Huener's book is an impressive new contribution to scholarship on Nazi church policies and occupation policies and will be essential reading for all those working in these fields. Nicely complementing Catherine Epstein's biography of Arthur Greiser, it provides a meticulously researched and judicious account of Nazi rule in this pivotal German-Polish borderland. Historians, like contemporary observers, will no doubt continue to debate how much the story of the “model Gau” reflected exceptional regional particularities and how much it anticipated a potential shared fate of other Poles, other Catholics, and other Christians.