Michael Miller's fine translation of Guillaume Zeller's 2015 work, La Baraque des prȇtres: Dachau, 1938–1945 (Tallandier), is the first study of Catholic clergy interned in Dachau concentration camp under National Socialism to appear in English. Zeller, a journalist and, for a brief time, editor-in-chief of i-Télé, a French national news network, offers an accessible but, at times, hagiographical account of the sufferings endured by the imprisoned priests. According to Zeller, “Never in the course of history, even in the worst hours of the French Reign of Terror or Communist persecution, have so many priests, monks, and seminarians been murdered in such a small area” (13). For Zeller, the Catholic Church was the entity under persecution by the Nazis. In his contextualizing, initial chapters, Zeller spends little to no ink to deliberate upon the church's initial appeasement of National Socialism or its enfeebled response to the persecution of Jews and other undesirables. Rather, Zeller's focus is myopic on the persecution of the European Catholic Church and its priests. Still, this limited examination is informative, especially through the book's clear organization into three parts: “A Camp for Priests,” (seven chapters) examining the origins and structure of the Dachau concentration camp; “O Land of Distress,” (six chapters) revealing the torture and agony of camp's clerical prisoners; and “A Spiritual Home,” (six chapters) describing both the priests' religious practice and their impact on post-war Catholicism.

Relying on the statistics provided by Johann Neuhäusler, a past auxiliary bishop of Munich and Freising and, as a priest, a former prisoner in Dachau, Zeller determines that 2,579 Catholic priests, monks, and seminarians entered Dachau. Of these, 1,034 lost their lives through physical and mental torture, medical experimentation, or disease. Polish priests were overrepresented, accounting for “67% of those priests interned in Dachau, and 84% of those who died there” (27). Despite these high numbers among the Poles, the priestly detainees came from numerous European nations. Priests were not always concentrated in Dachau as initially there was no such plan to centralize clergy into one concentration camp. In 1940, this ended after the Vatican intervened on behalf of interned priests. Luigi Maglione, the Cardinal Secretary of State of the Holy See, proposed moving interned Polish priests either to a neutral European country or to South America. The Nazi government rejected this suggestion, however, and on November 9, 1940, the Reich Ministry for Church Affairs informed the German bishops that interned clergy would be centralized in Dachau. Zeller quotes directly from the letter, including its signatory, Josef Roth, but fails to note that Roth was himself a priest of the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising who worked for the Nazi state and was primarily responsible for persecuting his fellow priests. From December 1940 onwards, priests determined to be a threat to Germany were sent to Dachau and assigned to Blocks 28 and 30, with Block 26 added in 1941. In early 1941, another intervention of the Holy See resulted in temporary privileges for clergy, including obligatory rest periods. Such “perks” in prisoner life brought little relief and only the ire of lay prisoners. By September, the few privileges ended, except for German priests, after a large contingent of Polish clergy inundated the camp. By 1942, the war severely affected all the prisoners of Dachau, creating food shortages that led to starvation conditions. Two serious bouts of typhus, one in 1942 and a second in 1943, also helped to decimate the number of prisoners, though the impact of the second wave affected the priests less due to quarantine.

In contrast to clergy of other European nationalities, German priests (Austrians included) generally were treated much better. Regularly, they had access to a chapel, received better rations, and were given their own barrack. Likewise, German priests often stringently followed the camp's rules and, at times, did not allow the consecrated hosts to be brought clandestinely to the barracks of clergy of other nationalities in fear of incurring the wrath of the SS and Kapos. Despite such treatment, significant bonding took place among all the clergy, including Protestants. Zeller stresses the importance of this latter point, so much so that, following the war, many of the interned clergy felt called to promote ecumenism. Similarly, he emphasizes that the interaction of clergy with lay prisoners opened their minds and hearts to people of various political and economic backgrounds, which, in turn, broadened the priests' ministerial outlook.

A strength of the book is Zeller's use of priests' memoirs to illustrate the various points he makes about life in Dachau. By contrast, Zeller has primarily limited his source material to only select memoirs, repeatedly drawing upon the same ones for his source material while at the same time offering little analysis throughout. Though his bibliography contains secondary source works, his citations reveal that he has generally ignored their arguments and findings. Zellner seems to be interested in presenting only a general overview of Catholic clergy interned in Dachau that positively portrays the church and its priests without delving more deeply into how they were affected by issues such as nationalism or anti-Semitism. So much more could have been explored, for example, by inquiring into the onerous tensions of the German and Austrian clergy with their co-religionists of other nationalities. Of course, such inadequacies provide avenues for historians to reexamine the topic anew.