The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany Book

In our blog on how Christians coped under the Nazi regime in Germany we consulted the main sources referenced in the Wikipedia article on this topic:
For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest Against Hitler, Victoria Barnett, 1992.
The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, Guenter Lewy, 2000, 1964
Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany, Robert P Ericksen, 2012.


At the time of Hitler about 97% of Germans were registered as Christians, a third were Catholic, two-thirds were Protestant, most were Lutheran or Reformed Christians. The histories of how the Protestant Church and Catholic Church coped under Nazi Germany, though they overlap considerably, are two very different histories.

My main criticism of all three of these books is they assumed the reader is already acquainted with the detailed history of Nazi Germany. We felt compelled to include many references to the Wikipedia articles on the many key events that signaled turning points in the social history of Nazi Germany. We wonder why Victoria Barnett did not include a chapter with detailed biographies of the two leading members of the Confessing Church, Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
We picked up some insights in the book Complicity in the Holocaust, which covers the history of both the churches and the universities during the rise of Hitler, consent and collaboration with the Nazi regime, and how these institutions processed their past during post-war de-Nazification.
Guenter Lewy's book, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, is on its second edition, reissued to incorporate the Catholic archives opened by the Vatican on the role of the Catholic Church during World War II. Lewy also used the Gestapo archives as a source. We found this to be a compelling narrative on a specialized topic, the Catholic Church under Hitler.

We found Victoria Barnett's book on the Protestant Confessing Church movement to be absolutely captivating. She used as a primary source countless interviews with many in the Confessing Church movement. Many people think that the Nazi death camps were mainly in Poland, most people do not realize that Nazi Germany had thousands of labor and death camps, there were many labor camps in Germany. The reason why Germany never asked their housewives to be Rosy Riveters was because they enslaved many Jews, political prisoners, French POW's, and many Poles and Eastern Europeans in their labor camps. Although these labor camps had a high mortality rate, few labor camps in Germany had gas chambers disguised as showers.

Victoria Barnett includes many excerpts from these interviews. This is from the interview describing a German labor camp near a parish (p. 101):
When the prisoners were taken to their work-place, one saw them- emaciated, wraith-like. Parish members and school children often put bread unobtrusively on the street curb, out of pity, so that the prisoners could grab it and get a little more nourishment. This happened even during the war, when food was rationed.

These interview excerpts relate how one German remembered how her lessons as schoolchild made her ashamed to be a German after her defeat (p. 27.):
We had the feeling we had no future. We suffered the consequences of World War I, which had broken out before we could walk, and we thought that we would never have a chance.

She tells of her thoughts as a teenager of how Hitler caused many Germans to be proud of their Fatherland (pp. 27-28):
We didn't exactly have the wish for revenge, I don't think it was about that, but we wanted to regain our national importance. We didn't' want to be somebody again- that sounds so much like ambition, it wasn't that either- but we wanted to be German brothers alongside German brothers. Then along came this man who could hit things right on the target, and who stood for a united, great German Reich. That was the sweetest sound to our ears.
The interviews that described how Hitler was able to turn the German people against their Jewish neighbors are particularly chilling.

Many of the books I have consulted for my blogs on how Christians cope under Fascist regimes have interesting histories of their own, some even have these histories on their own Wikipedia pages.
These books are also a source for a summary blog on the lessons learned from histories of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Vichy France, the Spanish Civil War, and Apartheid South Africa:


This blog also references a blog on the Vatican II decree on Religious Freedom, which discards the medieval notion that the absolute monarchies and the Catholic Church are partners, and the modern notion that since the Communism is the enemy of the Catholic Church, and since Fascism is the deadly enemy of Communism, then the Church can tolerate Fascism. Vatican II embraces democracy and rejects fascism.