This is in many ways a depressing book. In sober tones it seeks to describe and analyse the involvement of a number of German theologians in the antisemitic policies of the Third Reich. It tells its story mainly by examining the formation and history of the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life, formed in 1939 with its headquarters in Eisenach in Thuringia, and dedicated to the root and branch de-Judaization of the Church; and those who were significant members of the organisation. Its author, whose interest in the subject stretches back to 1990, and who has conducted a great deal of original archival research throughout Germany as well as interviewing some of the characters who are her subject, discusses the origins of the debate about religion and race in Germany preceding the Nazi period, showing how in some ways the institute continued tendencies in German theology, especially biblical studies, which had for many years promoted anti-Jewish attitudes. So, for instance, attempts to show that Jesus' Galilean origins implied his non-Jewish racial identity had a nineteenth-century pedigree (in this context Heschel discusses the work of the Frenchman, Ernest Renan, as well as some Germans); and the History of Religions School, a German phenomenon of the early part of the twentieth century, counting amongst its number those who were keen to show up the non-Jewish character of Jesus. Heschel's discussion of the establishment of the institute is lucid as she seeks to emphasise its racist aims: ‘Viewing the Institute solely in the context of the church and its politics, rather than the larger network of the many similar pseudo-research institutes that flourished during the Third Reich, ignores its function as a generator of anti-Semitic propaganda’ (p. 88). And in this context Heschel is keen to point out the great energy shown by its members in producing publications (one of the most notorious of which was a de-judaized version of the New Testament, entitled Die Botschaft Gottes, as well as a similar version of the catechism), holding conferences and giving lectures throughout Germany. Some of its most important members ended up holding tenured chairs in the theology faculty at the University of Jena, including Walter Grundmann, Hans F. K. Günther, Heinz Eisenhuth and Wolf Meyer-Erlach. Indeed Heschel maintains that the faculty could legitimately be called ‘Nazi’ in its profile, even if one of its more distinguished members, the young professor of Old Testament, Gerhard von Rad, was no Nazi (in fact he was a member of the Confessing Church) and strenuously objected to the fast developing tendency to exclude the Old Testament from the curriculum. Heschel devotes a large amount of space to Walter Grundmann, examining his theological influences, in particular Gerhard Kittel (imprisoned after the war for his involvement in the higher echelons of Nazi government) and Adolf Schlatter (no Nazi but a German nationalist with strong views about Judaism and the New Testament), his decision to join the Nazi party, his rise through the ranks of theologians, his involvement in the formation of the institute and his appointment to a tenured chair at Jena in spite of the fact that he had not ‘Habilitated’. Grundmann is also a significant factor in Heschel's discussion of the fate of these same theologians in the immediate aftermath of the war. Unlike some of his colleagues, Grundmann lost his chair at Jena, mainly because he had been a member of the Nazi party before the war, but he continued to hold a number of jobs in theological institutions, to retain his membership of the major international association of New Testament studies (the Societas Novi Testamenti Studiorum), and was a prolific writer, producing works, especially his commentaries on the three synoptic Gospels, which were to be main texts in seminaries and universities in Germany. Heschel explains the failure of the post-war authorities to punish these individuals in a number of ways. In part it had to do with concocting the fiction of Christianity's resistance to Nazism which was conceived of as anti-Christian: ‘(T)he allies assumed that Germans who demonstrate their involvement in the church in the Third Reich could not have been Nazis’ (p. 276). This was facilitated by individual members of the German Protestant Church who were willing to write letters which lied about the integrity of individual guilty parties. Universities were similarly remiss, not least because some of the worst Nazi propagandists were some of the few people available to teach Judaism. Significantly, there was also an ongoing inability on the part of the Church to distinguish between so-called legitimate expressions of anti-Judaism, a staple diet of theological students in German universities for many years (in this context Heschel shows the less than pristine record of many members of the Confessing Church in this area – many of them shared with the likes of Grundmann a contempt for the Jews), and the expression of Nazi antisemitism. And yet, as Heschel shows, the affinities between theology and race were more than elective: ‘Theologians gravitated towards racism as a tool to modernize Christianity and to demonstrate that its principles were in accord with racial theory’ (p. 286). Grundmann's survival was also facilitated by the East German authorities' reluctance to associate themselves with Nazi crimes.

This book deals with highly complex issues intelligently and without rancour. No doubt some will continue to argue that the theologians who are its subject were not dangerous racists in the way, for instance, of the Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher, a man who was executed after the war for his crimes. This book might make it a little more difficult to argue for such a clear distinction. That the Church in Germany failed in general to oppose the Nazis once it knew what was being done to the Jews can be construed as a sin of omission; but this book shows how many sins of commission there were, not least in the post-war years when the Church helped to make denazification superficial and facilitated the transformation of former Nazi leaders into respected members of post-war society without considering Christian responsibility for the fate of the Jews. Heschel acknowledges a change in attitudes amongst the German Churches to these matters since the 1980s but her book remains what will no doubt be a controversial indictment of those same Churches.

If I have a criticism of this impressive book, it lies in its failure directly to address the problem of why it was that there were not more Grundmanns than in fact there were; or, to put it another way, given the tendencies of German New Testament scholarship (and German biblical scholarship more generally) towards anti-Judaism, as delineated by Heschel, why were not more German theologians Nazis? Was the decision of a man like Grundmann to become a Nazi based upon things other than his Christian sympathies? Why did a man like Ernst Käsemann, not averse to expressing hostile opinions about Judaism in his published works (see, for instance, his commentary on Romans), openly oppose the regime? Heschel might reply that many Christian theologians took strong exception to the anti-Christian attitudes of the Nazis; and some were politically hostile to Nazism. But if, as is implied by her book, there is an almost seamless connection between the hostile opinions of elements of German theological scholarship and the antisemitic views of the Nazis, are such answers satisfactory?