Derek Hastings's fascinating and carefully researched book delivers on its promise to revise interpretations of the roots of National Socialism. Hastings succeeds in his twofold goal: to “shed new light not only on the broadly Catholic orientation of the movement before the 1923 putsch, but also on the transformative process whereby that early orientation was lost and never entirely regained” (p. 9). His method is straightforward and even modest. Using a rich combination of archival and contemporary published sources, notably Nazi and Catholic periodicals, he reconstructs the distinctive, anti-ultramontane, Roman Catholic, Munich milieu of the 1890s to 1920s, in which a “Catholic-Nazi symbiosis” (p. 16) emerged, evolved, and eventually expired. In the process, Hastings revisits and revises assumptions that most scholars have accepted as givens: about “Positive Christianity,” “political religion,” and the origins of the “undeniable antagonism between the Catholic Church and the Nazi regime in power” (p. 6).

Hastings's five chapters are organized chronologically to trace the rise and demise of the Nazi movement's Catholic identity. Each segment offers surprises. Chapter one reverses familiar discussions of the Catholic “response” to Nazism to examine instead the Catholic setting to which the early Nazis responded. Hastings describes the Catholic opponents of ultramontanism and political Catholicism who gave pre-World War I Munich its “peculiar complexion” (p. 19), and traces the roles of key individuals, organizations, networks, and publications. The priest-scholar Josef Müller, his student Franz Schrönghamer, the Krausgesellschaft, and the welter of journals—including Renaissance, Fliegende Blätter, and the Allgemeine Rundschau—that they and their Reform Catholic counterparts founded, edited, and filled, provided the “early Nazi movement with a sort of vocabulary with which to appeal to disillusioned and radicalized Catholics” (p. 31). Antisemitism, social-moral activism, and a völkisch orientation that drew on the rhetoric of eugenics were all part of this package. Small wonder, Hastings shows in chapter two, that Nazis articulated a Reform Catholic notion of “Positive Christianity” in the upheaval of 1919 and 1920 as their cure for the “Jewish-materialistic spirit” (p. 47). It was precisely Catholic publicists in Bavaria, among them Schrönghamer and his more famous friend Dietrich Eckart, we learn, who fused the antisemitic crusade of the Nazis with a call for Catholic-Christian revival, above all in the pages of the (NS)DAP organ, the Beobachter. These activists, Hastings suggests, had their own agenda, to oppose “political Catholicism,” which they believed was compromised by collaboration with Jews and Marxists, and to shape the Nazi movement into the only Catholic-Christian-völkisch option in Munich.

Chapters three and four explore links between a Catholic-inflected “Positive Christianity” and expansion of the Nazi movement in Munich from 1920 to 1923. Surprising here is the central role played by many Roman Catholic priests, including a number of former military chaplains, who served as Nazi speakers and publicists—“storm-troop preachers” in the vocabulary of the time (p. 109)—and the concomitant absence of Protestant clergy in this period. Also remarkable is Hastings's account of the NSDAP membership drive of 1923 and its explicit targeting of committed Catholics. The result was an almost threefold increase in the number of party members and a movement that contemporaries, friendly and critical, characterized as “Catholic oriented” (p. 110). All of the themes later trumpeted by the predominantly Protestant “German Christian” movement were already evident here: the NSDAP as the defender and champion of Positive Christianity; Christianity as a “warrior faith”; and the Aryan Jesus. Hastings focuses on religious matters but situates them in their wider context to show, for instance, the significance of Mussolini's “march on Rome” for development of the Nazi movement.

So what happened to the Catholic-Nazi synthesis? In chapter five, Hastings analyzes its collapse and subsequent erasure from the official Nazi story after 1923. Inspired by Mussolini's success and enthralled by an “increasingly messianic sense of his own political mission” (p. 142), Hitler, Hastings explains, traded away the special Catholic bond for a position at the head of the so-called Kampfbund, an assemblage of völkisch groups under the influence of Ludendorff. It was as leader of this motley band that Hitler launched the Beerhall Putsch of November 1923. With the failure of the conspiracy, Hastings shows, Catholics became easy targets for attacks from the Kampfbund movement. Ludendorff accused Cardinal Faulhaber of betraying the putsch, and Protestant-völkisch activists lambasted the Catholic “storm-troop” priests of preceding years as “agents of international Jesuitism” (p. 146). Although Hitler did not join in the invective and Faulhaber praised the Nazi movement's Catholic vision before the deal with Ludendorff, numerous believing Catholics abandoned the cause, and many who stayed came to see völkisch and Catholic loyalties as mutually exclusive.

The Nazi movement that emerged from the wreckage after 1925, Hastings maintains, was not only oriented toward Protestantism rather than Catholicism, but it had also begun to replace a “Positive Christianity” based on Catholic imagery and practices with a new set of Nazi symbols and sacraments. In other words, it had become “something that can accurately be considered a political religion in its own right” (p. 163). It is a credit to Hastings's insight and integrity that he manages to “navigate around” the conundrum he identifies: how to avoid indicting Catholicism for the crimes of Nazism while recognizing that some Catholic clergy and lay people, “acting as Catholics and in pursuit of what they perceived to be a legitimate form of Catholic identity,” played an important role in “the stabilization and spread of the early Nazi movement” (p. 179). Everyone interested in the history of modern Germany will benefit from reading this book.