Kevin Spicer's Hitler's Priests is a meticulous examination of a small subset of German Catholic priests who openly supported Hitler and the National Socialist movement. Through extensive research in church and state archives in Germany Spicer concludes that 138 priests out of more than 30,000 were pro-Nazi “brown priests” or “Hitler's priests.” Brown priests, according to Spicer's broad definition, included not only those clergymen who joined the Nazi Party but also those who remained outside the party and yet extolled the virtues of National Socialism in private correspondence, newspaper editorials, scholarly texts, and public lectures (p. 28). The Third Reich's fervent nationalism, hatred of communism, and fanatical anti-Semitism appealed to brown priests whose political orientation had been molded by the post-World War I chaos and upheaval and whose religious education was tainted by Christian anti-Semitism. Only one-third of the 138 brown priests joined the Nazi Party; the remaining eighty or so tended to be members of one of the conservative parties rather than the Catholic Center Party. Although interspersed with insightful analytical observations about the attraction of National Socialism for this tiny minority of Catholic clergy, Hitler's Priests is not primarily an analytical work. Rather it consists of fascinating and sometimes shocking depictions of the political and religious practices of a few dozen pro-Nazi priests. A handy appendix at the end of the book alphabetizes all the brown priests and provides some biographical details about each.

Spicer's book proceeds chronologically from the Weimar years through to the postwar years examining the enthusiasm and frustration of several brown priests as they strove to convince friends and colleagues that the interests of the Catholic Church and Nazi state were in harmony. Their efforts were not particularly successful. Throughout the text, Spicer focuses on three contentious relationships that illuminate why they failed: the dynamic between the Catholic Church and the Nazi state and party, the rapport between brown priests and their bishops, and the relationship between Nazi racial anti-Semitism and Christian religious anti-Semitism. Although brown priests may have failed to recruit many of their peers, Spicer provides plenty of evidence that many Catholic clergymen, like most Germans, found aspects of Nazism appealing.

Early in the Nazi reign, church leaders maintained relatively cordial relations with the new leaders even if they did not see eye to eye with every Nazi policy. The church feared being labeled “weak on nationalism” as it had by Bismarck. This explains in part why the German episcopacy lifted its ban on clergy joining the Nazi party in March 1933 and why it supported the July 1933 Reich-Vatican Concordat. Bishop of Freiburg Conrad Gröber was particularly intent on establishing good relations with the new state. In June 1933 he urged his priests to “avoid anything in sermons, Christian teaching and religious instruction … which could be interpreted as criticism of the leading personalities in the state” (p. 17). Many of Gröber's fellow bishops, however, were far less obliging. While Hitler himself remained above criticism, most church leaders, Spicer insists, disapproved of the Nazis' racial anti-Semitism and viewed the Nazi Weltanschauung as largely incompatible with Catholicism. The relationship between the church and state deteriorated quickly as the Nazis solidified their hold on power and no longer felt the need to acquiesce to clerical supporters.

The dual allegiance of brown priests frequently led to contentious relations with their church superiors. It was rare, however, for church authorities to remove them from the priesthood, and after the war most continued to preach undisturbed in their parishes. Fathers Philipp Haeuser and Anton Heuberger, for example, were reprimanded by their bishops for straying from the Christian message and had limits placed on speaking in public but nevertheless remained priests. Bishop Kumpfmüller of Augsburg called Haeuser “the disgrace of the entire German clergy” for his depiction of Jesus as a warrior and his call for Catholics to join in the Nazi struggle. Haeuser later wrote that he felt “nauseated by the Church's politics” and expressed shock and dismay that his superiors did not greet the Nazi revolution with the same passion as he did (p. 122). Heuberger ran afoul of his bishop when he penned an “open letter” in which he exalted the völkisch outlook of the Nazis. Bishop Michael Rackl accused Heuberger of “abandoning the eternal truth of Catholic dogma” and prohibited him from presiding over mass, hearing confession, preaching, and teaching religion, but he allowed him to remain pastor of his small parish. Spicer concludes that “in general the German episcopacy regarded any priest who appeared to work against the interests of the Catholic Church as disloyal and endeavored to silence the voice of any cleric who took the state's side in a conflict” (p. 74). The church hierarchy, however, “was not greatly troubled by the anti-Semitism of subordinates” (p. 9) and “tolerated extensive disobedience from their brown priests” when their disobedience did not challenge the basic tenets of the Catholic faith (p. 233).

While the ultranationalism and anti-Bolshevism of the Nazis appealed to many Catholic priests in Germany, Nazi racial theory was more problematic because it challenged the efficacy of baptism. A Jew who had received the Catholic sacrament of baptism was—in theory—accepted by the church as a Christian. The Nazis, however, were adamant in their conviction that a baptized Jew remained a Jew. Spicer believes that the church's traditional religious anti-Semitism provided in many cases “a convenient bridge” for the brown priests to embrace Nazi anti-Jewish policy. Father Josef Roth, for instance, called on Catholics to abandon their “catacomb anti-Semitism” and embrace racial anti-Semitism as a religious duty. Jews, he said, carried immorality in their blood. But other brown priests refused to embrace the racial anti-Semitism of the Nazis, maintaining that the way to battle the Jewish spirit was “to win the Jews for the cross,” as Haeuser put it (p. 108). Although Christian anti-Semitism and racial anti-Semitism were mutually reinforcing for ordinary Catholics, the church hierarchy, including the vast majority of its priests, Spicer maintains, rejected the Nazi racial theory that denied the efficacy of baptism.

Spicer's book at first glance with its sensational title and jacket cover depicting a brown priest receiving the Hitler salute from throngs of storm troopers raises immediate concerns that it might veer into Catholic bashing. But Hitler's Priests, like all of Spicer's work on the Catholic Church in the Nazi period, is a balanced and scholarly account that can be read both as a limited defense of the German Catholic clergy as a whole and as a severe condemnation of the Catholic tradition of religious anti-Semitism. Spicer argues convincingly that the National Socialist obsession with nationalism, hatred of communism, and fixation on the Jews as a source of depravity all corresponded with various tenets within the German Catholic Church. Nevertheless, the shared interests of the two groups only went so far. The Nazis' racial fanaticism and disrespect for the church greatly restricted clerical support, and those few priests who did embrace National Socialism found little comfort in either camp: they were seen as renegades by their bishops for their extreme political views and they were thought to be politically unreliable by the Nazis because of their Catholic faith.