The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

Guenter Lewy's The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, published by McGraw-Hill in 1964, was among the first scholarly studies to examine the German Catholic hierarchy's conduct under the Third Reich using church and state archival material, and it remains a frequently cited reference in the historiography of Christianity under Nazism. Its strength is that early archival grounding, at a time when few historians had attempted the subject. Its limit is its age and the debate it provoked: Lewy's critical reading of the hierarchy's public accommodation with the regime was contested on release and has been revisited by later historians with access to material not open to Lewy in the early 1960s, so a specific claim about individual bishops' conduct is better checked against more recent archival scholarship alongside this foundational study rather than against Lewy alone.