This collection of essays sheds much light on a theme where research into the documentation has only made a partial progress. It begins with a balanced essay by Thomas Brechenmacher into the part that the papacy played in its relations with Germany and Italy and the United States – ‘the fiction of impartiality’ and ‘the plaything of the powers’. Armin Boyens gives new information on the effects of war on the nearly-formed World Council of Churches with its administration in neutral Switzerland and what it could do for prisoners-of-war and refugees, its relations with the Jewish World Congress and with rare members of the German resistance. Then comes an informed essay on the four Scandinavian lands and their different fates. Lieve Gevers writes an able but to the reader painful essay on the comparison between Belgian and Dutch Catholics, followed by the even more painful study by Mertens of the plight of French Catholics both in Pétain's Vichy and occupied France. Then there are three studies on the Catholic Church in the lands of Eastern Europe, whether occupied like Poland or in the New Order like Hungary and Slovakia. This book then turns to Germany itself – the theory of just war, Nazi policies towards the Churches, how far army chaplains could act (with a portrait in depth of that lamentable chaplain-general Bishop Rakowski); to what extent Christians could help Jews, whether of Jewish faith or Christian. Then, a fascinating essay on hospitals, the one area where for much of the time the strong traditions in both denominations, with many nurses and beds, could cooperate easily with the state system, over such matters as care of the wounded – indeed the state could not manage without their help until there came state pressure for compulsory sterilisation and the plan for extensive euthanasia. What was the duty of the religious when they suspected that patients were transferred from their care, probably with the excuse of air raids, to another hospital which they had reason to believe a house of death? The cases of agonised conscience which resulted are plain. The state wished to transform religious hospitals into secular but, since the secular had better pay and conditions, local authorities shrank from the change. The state, with so many Germans in the army, imported forced labourers from occupied countries, who partly saved German agriculture and industry. Both Churches used such labour for their own needs, without scruple (for example in hospitals and kindergartens; for gardening, care of cemeteries and help in vicarages) though they tried to care for them pastorally, difficult for reasons of language and previous religious or non-religious experience, especially if they were Russians. They lost some of such help, partly through bombs and partly through flight. Personal relationships were easier in the farming world. As the bombing grew heavier pastoral care grew chaotic, clergy trying to hold prayers in air-raid shelters, or struggling to minister to villages swollen to unmanageable size by refugees from towns. Towards the end bishops could be outspoken against enemy behaviour: ‘war is a gallant struggle, but mass murder of children and the aged and the sick, destruction of churches and works of art and hospitals which every former war spared, cannot be called war … Crime is crime even in war, even against the enemy but especially against the helpless’ (August 1943).