The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

"The subject matter of this book is controversial," Guenter Lewy states plainly in his preface. To show the German Catholic Church's congeniality with some of the goals of National Socialism and its gradual entrapment in Nazi policies and programs, Lewy describes the episcopate's support of Hitler's expansionist policies and its failures to speak out on the persecution of the Jews. To this tragic history Lewy brings new focus and research, illuminating one of the darkest corners of our century with scholarship and intellectual honesty in a riveting, and often painful, narrative.

Guenter Lewy left his native Germany in 1939 at the age of fifteen, emigrating to Palestine and then to the U.S. He has been on the faculties of Columbia University, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts and is the author of Religion and Revolution, America in Vietnam, The Cause That Failed, and The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies.