Lauren Faulkner Rossi plumbs the moral justifications of Catholic priests who served willingly and faithfully in the German army in World War II. She probes the Church’s accommodations with Hitler’s regime, its fierce but often futile attempts to preserve independence, and the shortcomings of Church doctrine in the face of total war and genocide.

Spicer juxtaposes Catholicism and Nazism to provide a clear, balanced understanding of the challenges the clergy faced simply by celebrating the sacraments and teaching the faithful. By following individual priests in their day-to-day ministries, he documents how effectively they guarded their flock from a predatory ideology. Along the way, he highlights the leadership of Bishop Konrad von Preysing of Berlin, who enabled the diocesan clergy to speak out against Nazi violations of Catholic doctrine and practice, and Monsignor Bernhard Lichtenberg, who was sentenced to prison for publicly praying for Jews and other victims of Nazi oppression.

Ratline is the documented history about the mechanisms by which thousands of other Nazi war criminals fled to the remotest parts of the globe--including quite possibly Adolf Hitler. It is a story involving Soviet spies, Nazi priests, and a network of Catholic monasteries and safe houses known as the rat line. The name of one priest in particular, Monsignor Draganovic, was discovered by the author in a diary found in Indonesia. Why would this name turn up in a document written in a spidery German hand in a remote island in Indonesia? As famed author Peter Levenda began his research, more information came to light: In December of 2009, it was revealed that the skull the Russians claimed was Hitler's--salvaged from the bunker in 1945--was not that of Hitler! In 2010, files from the Office of Special Investigations of the Justice Department were declassified, revealing a history of American intelligence providing cover for Nazi war criminals. The mystery deepened, and the author returned to his own roots hunting Nazis in North America, South America and Europe. He revisited old contacts, made some new ones, and gradually the explosive story was revealed: there is no forensic evidence to prove that Adolf Hitler died in the bunker in April 1945!

Bernhard Lichtenberg: Roman Catholic Priest and Martyr of the Nazi Regime is the definitive English biography of the martyred Nazi-era Berlin provost, Bernhard Lichtenberg. This work presents a broad overview of Bernhard Lichtenberg’s life (1875–1943) in the context of history. It discusses the areas of his life that had the greatest impact on how he dealt with situations during the Second Empire, the Weimar Republic, and the Third Reich, and it gives a detailed account of his resistance to the Nazis and his imprisonment and death. Appendices present a wealth of primary sources on Lichtenberg’s life, including a collection of his letters from prison which have not previously been made available in English.

”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.

At the Nazi concentration camp Dachau, three barracks out of thirty were occupied by clergy from 1938 to 1945. The overwhelming majority of the 2,720 men imprisoned in these barracks were Catholics—2,579 priests, monks, and seminarians from all over Europe. More than a third of the prisoners in the "priest block" died there. The story of these men, which has been submerged in the overall history of the concentration camps, is told in this riveting historical account. Both tragedies and magnificent gestures are chronicled here--from the terrifying forced march in 1942 to the heroic voluntary confinement of those dying of typhoid to the moving clandestine ordination of a young German deacon by a French bishop. Besides recounting moving episodes, the book sheds new light on Hitler's system of concentration camps and the intrinsic anti-Christian animus of Nazism.

Catholic priests all across Poland were arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps at the beginning of World War II. This memoir by Fr. Henryk Maria Malak (1912-1987) is their story and his. Through the author's eyes we witness the German invasion, atrocities against the local population, and the roundup of priests from the region. A series of "transports" takes them to Stutthof and Grenzdorf in Poland, then to Sachsenhausen and Dachau in Germany. Fr. Malak spent more than four years at Dachau, and he describes camp life in detail. (His final chapters are entries from a diary he kept secretly near the end of the war.) Some priests are selected for medical experiments; others are sent on "death transports." Throughout their ordeal they face brutal treatment, hard labor, hunger, disease. Although many perish along the way, all remain steadfast in their faith and in their loyalty to Poland.

Written with economy and in chronological order, this book offers a comprehensive account of the response to the Nazi tyranny by Pope Pius XII, his envoys, and various representatives of the Catholic Church in every country where Nazism existed before and during WWII. Peter Bartley makes extensive use of primary sources letters, diaries, memoirs, official government reports, German and British. He manifestly quotes the works of several prominent Nazis, of churchmen, diplomats, members of the Resistance, and ordinary Jews and gentiles who left eye-witness accounts of life under the Nazis, in addition to the wartime correspondence between Pius XII and President Roosevelt. This book reveals how resistance to Hitler and rescue work engaged many churchmen and laypeople at all levels, and was often undertaken in collaboration with Protestants and Jews. The Church paid a high price in many countries for its resistance, with hundreds of churches closed down, bishops exiled or martyred, and many priests shot or sent to Nazi death camps. Bartley also explores the supposed inaction of the German bishops over Hitler's oppression of the Jews, showing that the Reich Concordat did not deter the hierarchy and clergy from protesting the regime's iniquities or from rescuing its victims. While giving clear evidence for Papal condemnation of the Jewish persecution, he also explains why Pius XII could not completely set aside the language of diplomacy and be more openly vocal in his rebuke of the Nazis.

Ratline is the documented history about the mechanisms by which thousands of other Nazi war criminals fled to the remotest parts of the globe—including quite possibly Adolf Hitler. It is a story involving Soviet spies, Nazi priests, and a network of Catholic monasteries and safe houses known as the ratline. The name of one priest in particular, Monsignor Draganovic, was discovered by the author in a diary found in Indonesia. Why would this name turn up in a document written in a spidery German hand in a remote island in Indonesia? As famed author Peter Levenda began his research, more information came to light: In December of 2009, it was revealed that the skull the Russians claimed was Hitler’s—salvaged from the bunker in 1945—was not that of Hitler! In 2010, files from the Office of Special Investigations of the Justice Department were declassified, revealing a history of American intelligence providing cover for Nazi war criminals. The mystery deepened, and the author returned to his own roots hunting Nazis in North America, South America and Europe. He revisited old contacts, made some new ones, and gradually the explosive story was revealed: there is no forensic evidence to prove that Adolf Hitler died in the bunker in April 1945!