The Polish Catholic Church Under German Occupation The Reichsgau Wartheland, 1939-1945

Jonathan Huener, professor of history at the University of Vermont, has produced a definitive study of the Catholic Church in western Poland under German occupation

Jonathan Huener's careful examination of the fate of the Catholic Church in western Poland-the Nazi German "Warthegau"-during World War II triangulates an impressive variety of sources in German and Polish to assess Nazi religious policy and the experience of Polish Catholics victimized by it. . . . This is essential reading for those interested in Nazi empire, Polish nationalism, or the history of the Catholic Church.

Huener's book is an impressive new contribution to scholarship on Nazi church policies and occupation policies and will be essential reading for all those working in these fields. Nicely complementing Catherine Epstein's biography of Arthur Greiser, it provides a meticulously researched and judicious account of Nazi rule in this pivotal German-Polish borderland.

This impeccably researched study proffers an invaluable analysis and a first Anglophone synthesis of Polish, German, and Catholic sources, while it also assimilates an important secondary literature in Polish and German, including the recent, ground-breaking Polish historiography on the Holocaust.

The Polish Catholic Church under German Occupation by Jonathan Huener is an engaging study that asks important questions about the Nazi attitude towards the Catholic Church in general, and the Polish Catholic Church in particular. Interestingly, as Huener emphasizes, the Nazi policy towards the Catholic Church was neither consistent throughout the war nor uniform in all the Nazi-occupied territories. . . . The book is a fascinating addition to what we know about the way the Nazi regime operated. It is great work that will be beneficial to historians of Poland, the Second World Word, and Nazism. But it is also a great book for both undergraduate and graduate students.

The Polish Catholic Church under German Occupation is a masterpiece of "thick description." Simply put this is one of the best-researched books that I've ever encountered. Huener has mined not only German and Polish state archives, Polish émigré collections, and documentation held by Yad Vashem and by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, but he has clearly traveled to all of the sites whose wartime fates he reconstructs in the book, and he has scavenged and read everywhere he could, from convents and seminaries to postwar collections of interviews gathered by Church officials and communists alike. Huener is also an elegant and eminently readable prose stylist. His book seamlessly interweaves rich portraits of individual and collective human suffering and heroism (without crossing over into martyrology), with some helpful and informative number-crunching, as well as cool-headed and insightful analysis of various institutional logics and ideological ambiguities.