Hitler's Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism

Abstract

Kevin Spicer's new book provides a comprehensive analysis of the 1% of Roman Catholic clergy in Germany during the Nazi era who fell into the category of the ‘brown priests’. These one hundred and thirty-eight priests explicitly identified with the National Socialist movement and ideology and accordingly sought to build bridges between Roman Catholicism and the Nazi party. Fifty-three actually joined the Nazi party, twenty-eight wound up leaving the priesthood, and an even smaller number were subjected to Allied denazification efforts after 1945. What led these men to pledge their support to the Nazi cause and how did they come to believe that Christianity and Nazism were compatible? To answer these questions, Spicer methodically combed fifty-one archives in Germany, the United States and Austria, an impressive feat of research by any measure. Of these one hundred and thirty-eight priests, one hundred and nine were diocesan priests within Germany, nineteen were members of religious orders and ten were from dioceses outside Germany. Many held doctorates. Some were veterans of the First World War, who returned from the front as ardent nationalists and were angered over German defeat and the dictates of the Treaty of Versailles. The biographical sketches he provides of notorious brown priests such as Phillip Haeuser shows that some were disturbingly antisemitic and bought into the Nazi ideology for precisely this reason.