The Church and the State

The Church and the State

The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany
by Guenter Levy
McGraw Hill, 1964, 416 pp., $7.50

Both irony and justice attend the world-wide public trial which the Papacy and the German Catholic Church are now undergoing for their conduct during the Third Reich. Irony because during the occupation and Adenauer years, the German Church profited from its supposed resistance record. To a considerable extent this record is now shown to be a product of imagination intermingled with elements of misrepresentation. And irony again because it is the German playwright Hochhuth who has directed universal attention to Pius XII’s reticence to condemn publicly Hitler’s policy of Jewish extermination.

It is only justice, furthermore, that a descendant of German Jews should be the first to present a detailed record of the Catholic hierarchy’s relations with the Nazi regime. To be sure, the America...