Books like Pope and Devil — picked by fans

Huener has produced a definitive study of the Catholic Church in western Poland under German occupation. Identified by the Germans as the Reichsgau (district) Wartheland or Warthegau, it encompassed 45,000 square kilometers (roughly the size of Vermont and New Hampshire) with a “population of more than 4.9 million, including approximately 4.2 million Poles, 400,000 Jews, and 325,000 Germans.” Of this demographic, 3.8 million were Catholic and ninety percent were ethnic Poles. The German Reich incorporated the territory even though its borders remained guarded and not easily crossed. It included 1,023 parishes, served by 1,829 diocesan priests, 277 male religious, and 2,666 women religious.

Before World War II ended, the German occupiers would close more than ninety-seven percent of the churches, dissolve all Catholic organizations, deport, or imprison most women religious, and arrest more than 1,500 priests, of whom 815 they murdered directly or indirectly. In eighteen succinct and exceptionally well-written… show more.

The leading expert on the Holy See during World War II, Ventresca offers us an immensely readable and authoritative biography of the elusive Eugenio Pacelli. In many ways, it surpasses all previous biographies in its comprehensive and convincing analysis of its central subject, Pope Pius XII. Ventresca adeptly bores through the polemical and problematic arguments that encompass the decades-long “Pius Wars” and offers us a balanced portrait of Pacelli, who is neither a condemned reprobate nor an exalted saint. Rather, Ventresca shows that Pacelli was a man of his time, burdened with nearly insurmountable challenges, who nevertheless consistently preferred to address them through a diplomatic path of prudence and caution that always placed the needs of the institutional Church before all other concerns.  

Ruff has produced a tour de force examination of the behind-the-scenes historiography of the Catholic Church in Nazi Germany. A deeply and richly researched study, it enables both specialists and non-specialists alike to comprehend the complex and tempestuous writing of the history of the Catholic Church’s choices during Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s years in power. In particular, Ruff delves into the storm over Rolf Hochhuth’s controversial play, The Deputy, to help us understand the current controversies over the choices of Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust.  

In From Enemy to Brother, John Connelly, observes, “If there was a neighbor needing a Good Samaritan in the 1930s it was the Jew, yet the day’s moral theology placed Jews on the lowest rung of the ‘hierarchy of love’: after family, after other Catholics, and after members of one’s nation and race.” Jews who converted to Christianity failed to advance much higher. As Connelly shows, at least in Central and Eastern Europe, some Catholic theologians taught that conversion did not immediately free Jews of their Jewish heritage. It could take generations before Christianity completely took hold. Catholic anti-Judaic deicide teaching, fueled by centuries of Christian antisemitism, bore and nourished such a negative outlook toward Jews. In the 1930s, Catholic theologians only had to take one step further to link their primitive view of Jews and Jewish converts to the prevailing National Socialist racial teaching. The result produced an… show more.

Jantzen has produced a thoroughly engaging study of the German Lutheran pastors under National Socialism. By contrast to the traditional “top down” institutional narratives on the Kirchenkampf (German Church Struggle), Jantzen has produced a “bottom up” work that focuses on the choices made by ordinary parish pastors under Hitler’s rule. As his point of departure, he examines Lutheran pastors working in three Church districts: Nauen, located northwest of Berlin in Brandenburg; Pirna, in southeast of Dresden in Saxony; and Ravensburg, in southern Württemberg. Throughout his work, Jantzen convincingly compares the response of the clergy in these diverse geographic areas. Though there were notable exceptions among these pastors, Jantzen concludes that Protestant clergy “largely failed to resist or even critique the Nazi state.” 

I feel that stylistically and in terms of passion, this is non-fiction at its best; it reads like a thriller.

Kertzer is a master of narrative, and his indictment of the indifference of the church before the German occupation of Europe and the Holocaust troubled me deeply as a person of faith. Despite being a professional historian, I was impressed by the humanity of his treatment of real people.

His description of the round-up of the Jews of the Rome Ghetto is genuinely moving, highly disturbing, and brought tears to my eyes. My particular enjoyment of the book came from its many archival discoveries in the Vatican Archives.  

I love stories about America at its best, its most uplifting, its most inspiring, and I can’t imagine anyone telling the story of the Berlin airlift and what he calls “America’s finest hour” in more gripping detail than Andrei Cherny in The Candy Bombers.

With style and elegance, he takes you into the White House, where Truman decides to save West Berlin from Stalin’s attempted conquest, and he puts you in the cockpits of the pilots who delivered food and other necessities on a round-the-clock basis to the desperate people of that city. How good is this book? I wish I had written this book myself.

I really like the work of Mark Hewitson, a historian based at University College London. This book appeared in 2018 and is one of his most ambitious to date. It looks at how Germans conceived of themselves and their place in the world in the years before the First World War. Although historians sometimes talk about the late 19th century as the first phase of globalization—and the German language certainly gained lots of new compound nouns starting with Welt (or world) Hewitson shows that most contemporaries’ interactions and horizons remained intra-European or transatlantic rather than truly global.

Anytime I give a talk, someone asks, “Well, what was really going on with FDR? Why didn’t he do anything?” And the answer to that is always: it’s complicated. But Breitman and Lichtman do a great job explaining how FDR could be both beloved by the Jewish community in the 1930s and 1940s and blamed today for not welcoming Jewish refugees escaping Hitler. And the answer is partly our expectations. We want him to have been a humanitarian, but he was a politician who did some things when he could, but ultimately prioritized recovery from the Great Depression and victory in World War II. You’re going to leave the book more frustrated than when you started, but maybe that’s the answer? It was complicated.

Writing about the end of the Cold War, Mary Sarotte argues the fall of the Berlin Wall was not inevitable and that the United States was not the dominant player. She focuses instead on the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s drive for German reunification and a new architecture for post-Cold War Europe. More significantly, her book was one of the first to treat 1989 not as an endpoint in international relations but as a beginning.