British Christians and the Third Reich: Church, State and the Judgement of Nations, by Andrew Chandler

Abstract

Since the 1990s, Andrew Chandler has published a series of important studies of the reactions of leading figures in the Church of England to Nazi Germany. In articles and essays, he has described and assessed their attitudes towards the persecution of Jews during the 1930s, the British government’s foreign policies during the decade, the Munich settlement of 1938, and the ‘obliteration bombing’ of Germany during the Second World War. In books and editions, he has been especially concerned with the deep engagement of George Bell, bishop of Chichester, with the pastors of the Protestant ‘Confessing Church’ who resisted Nazi attempts to create a comprehensive state church. In this new book he draws together, broadens and extends these earlier studies, to produce a wide-ranging account of the practical and moral responses of British churchmen to Nazi policies from Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933 to the Nuremberg trials in 1946. Although Chandler might not welcome an allusion to a once-controversial work, this is an investigation of the ‘impact of Hitler’ on the British churches.