Catholics and Third Reich was originally published in German in 2009. At the time a valuable overview of existing literature on the subject, the book consciously emulates the approach to scholarship set by Die Katholiken und das Dritte Reich, edited by Klaus Gotto and Konrad Repgen (the current volume is dedicated to the latter for his eighty-fifth birthday) and published in 1980. With separate introductions by the two editors and ten chapters by five established scholars in the field (the editors also wrote three of the essays), the book's purpose, mirroring that of Gotto and Repgen, is ‘to present essential questions about the relationship of the Church, Catholics, and National Socialism in an easy-to-read yet still academically sound form for a broad reading public’ (p. 8). Their stated goal is to make the topic of each chapter as accessible as possible, and to shy away from an all-encompassing presentation in favour of a ‘“snapshot” of the current state of the debate’ (p. 8). The decision to translate the book into English several years later reflects the volume's trajectory since 2009, as the editors assert that it has itself become part of the controversies and debates that it examines.

The book is divided into three parts: controversies and debates, images of history, and a bibliography that includes a series of maps showing Catholic voting behaviour in Germany between 1925 and 1933. The final chapter's examination of historical photos and their influence is a particularly illuminating commentary on how to consider carefully the context of images and their captions. The introductions are deep immersions in the research on the book's subject – German Catholics and the Third Reich (non-German Catholics, with the exceptions of popes Pius xi and xii and a couple of brief glances at the Austrian episcopate, are not part of the study) – as well as scholarship on the subject as it has developed from 1945 into the twenty-first century. The editors have also attempted to close the gap between the original German edition of the book and this translation by listing twenty-two important works published in the field, mostly in German, since 2009 (and one from 2009) in the general bibliography, though it is unclear to what extent these new works had an impact on the chapters.

As to delivering on the book's purpose, the chapters deal sensitively and expertly with their subjects and exhibit a good understanding of the relevant scholarship. These subjects showcase the depth of and diversity within any serious study of Catholics under Nazism; some overlap is unavoidable but each chapter remains distinct. Wolfgang Altgeld explores the ideological intersections and distinctions between Nazism and Catholicism. Matthias Stickler parses terminology in his review of the 1933 Reich concordat and its impact on the German (and to a lesser extent, Austrian) episcopate. In his chapters, Karl-Joseph Hummel studies the German bishops’ exercise of pastoral care and their entanglements with politics as well as post-1945 expressions of complicity and guilt by Church leaders (he also authored the final chapter about photographs and their contexts). Thomas Brechenmacher provides an overview of the complex, difficult relationship between Catholics and Jews in one chapter, and wartime papal foreign policy (including Pius xii's ‘silence’ about the Holocaust) in another. Christoph Kösters delves into milieu studies in his analysis of the notion of a German ‘Catholic milieu’, and the extent to which Nazism penetrated it. Michael Kissener re-examines several well-known individual cases of resistance, and Annette Mertens considers the impact of the war and different dimensions of religious responses to the conflict, from bishops’ public exhortations to military chaplains to conscientious objectors.

Each author delivers a succinct overview of the historiographical debate around the subject of the chapter, and then focuses closely on contested interpretations of central issues. The strength of the chapters is their success in synthesising some of the most complex and, at times, vociferous debates in modern German history; readers will find the footnotes to most chapters very useful. The authors also convey their own positions within the historiography, which will certainly continue to spark debate among the book's readers. For example, in one of the book's strongest chapters, Thomas Brechenmacher makes a careful distinction between religious-based anti-Judaism and a ‘newer “anti-Semitism”, with its economic and racist argumentation’, and then asserts problematically that the former ‘could never have led to genocide of the Jews’ (p. 131). Kissener drives to the heart of the controversy around resistance to Nazism in conceding that we cannot speak of resistance by the Church as an institution, because the Church as a whole did not (could not?) resist; instead, we must focus on individual resisters for a more precise understanding of Catholic resistance, even if this approach precludes any satisfying conclusion about the broad concept of ‘Catholic resistance’. In his chapter on the bishops, Hummel refutes, or at least undermines, the charge of ‘milieu egotism’ that critics use to explain the German episcopate's failure to speak out on behalf of civil and human rights. But his evidence is to point to just two German bishops (only one of whose examples might work for the argument) out of the twenty-seven regular members of the Fulda Bishops Conference, and then digress about foreign bishops and priests imprisoned in Dachau.

Mertens's chapter on German Catholics’ response to the war demonstrates the most obvious gap between the 2009 German-language edition and this one. Her footnotes point almost entirely to German-language sources from before 2009, rendering her opening comment about the underexamined nature of wartime Catholics less true than it was a decade ago (p. 199). Her scholarship omits many crucial English-language works and several significant German-language studies that have reshaped this subject since 2010. Such a gap affects all the chapters, to varying extents, and is one of the main drawbacks of the text. Another flaw is the translation itself. Since the editors profess the aim of accessibility and ease of reading, one is baffled by the quality of the text, which includes such sentences as ‘Olaf Blaschke is even of the opinion, that it should only be spoken about Catholic “resitance” [sic] if the coöaboration [sic] of Catholics with the NS-regime is mentioned at the same time’ (p. 171) and archaic words like ‘accompliceship’ and ‘resistiveness’. Translation from German to English requires careful attention to long sentences and the use of passive voice, both of which are ubiquitous in the former language and discouraged in the latter; Christof Morrisey seems to have retained all instances. A reviewer would be petty to point to a couple of sentences where spelling mistakes or bad grammar slipped past a copy editor, but Morrisey's prose, together with errors that should have been easily corrected, is distracting and even occasionally hinders comprehension.

Overall, the book's comprehensive summary of historiographical debates about Germany's Catholics during the Third Reich through the first decade of the twenty-first century is valuable, and its synthesis of the German-language literature is first-rate. But readers should be wary of treating it as the final word on the subject, as the field has continued to evolve dramatically in ways that this text no longer quite accounts for.